On Wed, 4 Nov 2009, John Smith wrote: > Do you work for this company, or have a contact with them?
Just so the list knows... I work for NearMap (as does Alex K), and I'm happy to respond to enquiries on the list. There are actually a few of us on various OSM forums and lists, but being a public company we're sometimes a little bit constrained in what we can say. The best way to interact with us is via the forum on the NearMap site (http://www.production.nearmap.com/community/contribute.aspx and click on Forum), but I get the emails on this list and will read those that refer to us :) Anyway, in answer to a few of the questions that have come up: * We use different aircraft in different locations; the comments by James Andrewartha about the HyperPod are pretty much on the button. * The need for authentication to access the website has been fully removed now, so JOSM should be able to query our servers directly. * We added the licensing about tracing for OSM specifically to allow use of our images to boost the OSM data. If you read more on our website (for example, http://www.production.nearmap.com/help/faq.aspx#Gq4) you'll see that we generate our StreetMap tiles from the OSM data, so it's very much to our mutual benefit to get that data as up-to-date as we can. In fact, since we all live in Perth, there are quite a few updates to the data that we've contributed, using the Potlatch custom URL format. * Load balancing: all the externally available hostnames resolve to balanced IPs, so you could use any of the web0-web7 or www hostnames. However, to make sure that you get the best service, including using the nearest web servers to you (in net-connectivity terms), use www.nearmap.com. * Accuracy: this is important to us! The initial surveys of some cities suffered some teething troubles with hardware and the accuracy suffered. You can generally expect the accuracy to be as good as the recent Perth surveys, and when we reprocess the older surveys they will get more accurate. If you are assessing accuracy and find somewhere that we appear to be way out (preferably against a known reference point), then please let us know, via the forum. * Caching tiles: if you can, please do. They're served with strong etags and suitable Cache-Control and Max-Age headers. If your system honours those, you'll get updated images in a reasonable time frame and avoid hitting our servers too hard. Incidentally, if you do try and suck down tiles at a very high rate, you may well get throttled and start getting 509 responses. Cheers Ben -- View this message in context: http://old.nabble.com/NearMap-PhotoMap-imagery-for-OSM-tp26192031p26383423.html Sent from the OpenStreetMap - Australian Talk mailing list archive at Nabble.com. _______________________________________________ Talk-au mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-au
