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Very very cool. Anybody know of similar projects? I think I'll give it a whirl on some old 60's fenceline maps I have around.
Very very cool. Anybody know of similar projects? I think I'll give it a whirl on some old 60's fenceline maps I have around.
And while not mapping, John Resig's Ukiyo-e [2] project is one of the coolest projects I've seen in the digital cultural heritage space in some time. He's been applying image recognition to these incredible Japanese woodblock prints from museums, galleries, dealers, universities and libraries all around the world. Because these things are prints, there could be hundreds of prints from the same block master all around the world, but because the expertise in the field is so divergent, the cataloging practices are really inconsistent. Different institutions might call artists by totally different names (or think a print is by totally different artists). So he built a search-by-image search engine of hundreds of thousands of Ukiyo-e that finds and reunifies prints totally independently of their metadata. Which is cool when you find 5-10 of the same print in places around the world. But it's cooler when it matches 2 prints with totally different artists and publishers and dates because at some point after the first print was made, someone bought the block master, cut out the face and replaced it with another, then did the same for the signature [3][4].
Actually, The Vectorizer owes a big debt of gratitude to John and his brother Mike. Mike Resig is a geographer and was the first to show us a process for how this kind of automated identification is possible.
[1]: http://www.mapbox.com/blog/user-friendly-guided-feature-extr... [2]: http://ukiyo-e.org [3]: http://ukiyo-e.org/image/met/DP134583 [4]: http://ukiyo-e.org/image/mfa/sc214530
This is pretty cool. A lot of manual work on OSM, back when I was with some OSM nerds in DC, faced the problem of manual imports and a tool like this would have been very, very useful. Thank you NYPL!
OSM's been pretty hardcore about their no import policy because of accuracy issues in validation. They want to map these places themselves and don't want to trust others for accuracy, let alone the legal issues that come with importing data (ugh). We, however are far more lenient (mostly because we can't afford to build a time machine to map the past ourselves). On the other hand, Mike Migurski's Green Means Go [1] p…
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Import
But most of that's importing already digitised info. Relevant to this topic, vectorising from images, there seems to be renewed work on autotracing from satellite imagery coming to the iD editor:
http://www.mapbox.com/blog/user-friendly-guided-feature-extr...
edit: just noticed you linked to that elsewhere in this thread.
Very very cool. Anybody know of similar projects? I think I'll give it a whirl on some old 60's fenceline maps I have around.
A naive version is also fairly easy to build up from existing tools (e.g. OpenCV), but getting it to work reliably is often a pain. Even with the best tools, this sort of thing requires a lot of manual QC. It still greatly speeds things up, though!
I've always wanted the equivalent of * Maps with a time dimension. The data is constantly changing, but imagine if you could push the slider back hundreds of years and see how a city evolved. There is a whole "dark" dimension of data out there that is only captured in print. (e.g. NYC business directories from the 19th/20th century -- being able to see what a particular address used to be) Adding historical map data…
I'm part of the team at NYPL Labs that's been working on these historical geospatial projects for the past few years (The Vectorizer is the work of our own @MGA), and that's EXACTLY what we've been working toward. For almost 4 years, we've had staff and volunteers going over scans of geo-rectified (stitching and stretching a raster image so it aligns with geospatial coordinates) historical insurance maps of NYC metic…
I've always wanted the equivalent of * Maps with a time dimension. The data is constantly changing, but imagine if you could push the slider back hundreds of years and see how a city evolved. There is a whole "dark" dimension of data out there that is only captured in print. (e.g. NYC business directories from the 19th/20th century -- being able to see what a particular address used to be) Adding historical map data…
I'm part of the team at NYPL Labs that's been working on these historical geospatial projects for the past few years (The Vectorizer is the work of our own @MGA), and that's EXACTLY what we've been working toward. For almost 4 years, we've had staff and volunteers going over scans of geo-rectified (stitching and stretching a raster image so it aligns with geospatial coordinates) historical insurance maps of NYC metic…
Even just something as simple as showing an OSM with all the historical election districts / assembly districts over time for each census/election as map layers would visually convey to someone looking at an address what would otherwise take a decent amount of time to look up.
The NYC Dept. of Records has all the tax lot photos from the 1940 and 1980 canvas, so you could even build up a historical "street view" for the 5 boroughs. I've always found it annoying that they keep this data locked up and charge a decent sum for each photo. It is something that a decent microfilm scanner could make quick work of, but I don't know if they have plans to liberate all of that image data as part of the open data efforts.
NYPL does a lot of great open source mapping work. They also funded an open source raster map warper that I've forked. http://maps.nypl.org/warper/
I've always wanted the equivalent of * Maps with a time dimension. The data is constantly changing, but imagine if you could push the slider back hundreds of years and see how a city evolved. There is a whole "dark" dimension of data out there that is only captured in print. (e.g. NYC business directories from the 19th/20th century -- being able to see what a particular address used to be) Adding historical map data…