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bellingcat / open-questions

Want to contribute? These are difficult, long-term projects that could be valuable to open source investigators at Bellingcat and around the world.
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Add suggestions around OSM/other mapping dataset feature location #4

Closed pbeart closed 3 years ago

pbeart commented 3 years ago

Would like feedback from experienced geolocators on how useful this would actually be before proposing

ozhyrenkov commented 3 years ago

Hey there! It depends on your goal - could you please give an example of task to accomplish? I have used OSM and geo-tagging in few services and maybe can at least point to right direction :)

E.g. friend of mine used OSM to assess apartments to buy like the distance to nearest school, medical centre, railway, city center etc. Is that kind of a thing needed?

pbeart commented 3 years ago

Hey, the idea was basically to provide an automated alternative to manually looking for features identified in a photo to geolocate an image. So for example it could be as simple as searching for 'large apartment block, gas station and river within 50m of each other', or as complex as 'railway line passing through forest with two buildings either side' (except described by the location of identified features in a real image). I think a basic version of this would be very feasible and a more semantic (i.e. searching for features and their relative positions) version would be a little trickier, but the main question is whether it would actually be useful or if manual geolocation is already fine. (side note it would be useful to find some 'unsolved' geolocation problems i.e. video or photos whose location is unknown). Thanks for your interest in this

loganwilliams commented 3 years ago

This is a really cool idea, thank you @pbeart!