2007-02-24
Idea: Open Road Logger
I think it would be useful to have open and publicly available photo and/or video logs of various roads and highways. These logs could serve as source material for projects like the WikiProject U.S. Roads and even for highway and civic planners.
To be really useful and readily available the logs probably need to be tagged with some kind of open license, like a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike license. This way information from multiple logs and be combined to produce reports, plans, etc., without worrying about getting the rights to use the data, which is a common problem with mapping and GIS data today.
There are a couple of ways that these photo / video logs might be facilitated. The one option might be to write GPLed a Mono / .Net application to integrate photos and/or video with GPS data in real time (as it is collected) then post the resulting log to sites like Flickr, YouTube, Wikimedia Commons, Internet Archive, etc. Another option might be to develop a flash application that would capture images and GPS data and submit it to some kind of central repository.
Logs of major highways could be collected quite frequently if open minded truckers got involved. Minor highways and local roads would likely require efforts by local supporters and/or local governments and would probably get updated relatively infrequently.
At some point I hope to try some experiments with the same road for which I wrote the original Wikipedia article, WA SR-204. It is short at about 2.4 miles and not very far away from where I live. I'd need to get a new GPS as I still haven't replaced the one that was stolen from my Jeep a couple of years ago.
Anyone know anything about controlling cameras and/or GPS receivers through USB in Mono / .Net? Also anyone have references to XML schema for geotagging images and/or video?
To be really useful and readily available the logs probably need to be tagged with some kind of open license, like a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike license. This way information from multiple logs and be combined to produce reports, plans, etc., without worrying about getting the rights to use the data, which is a common problem with mapping and GIS data today.
There are a couple of ways that these photo / video logs might be facilitated. The one option might be to write GPLed a Mono / .Net application to integrate photos and/or video with GPS data in real time (as it is collected) then post the resulting log to sites like Flickr, YouTube, Wikimedia Commons, Internet Archive, etc. Another option might be to develop a flash application that would capture images and GPS data and submit it to some kind of central repository.
Logs of major highways could be collected quite frequently if open minded truckers got involved. Minor highways and local roads would likely require efforts by local supporters and/or local governments and would probably get updated relatively infrequently.
At some point I hope to try some experiments with the same road for which I wrote the original Wikipedia article, WA SR-204. It is short at about 2.4 miles and not very far away from where I live. I'd need to get a new GPS as I still haven't replaced the one that was stolen from my Jeep a couple of years ago.
Anyone know anything about controlling cameras and/or GPS receivers through USB in Mono / .Net? Also anyone have references to XML schema for geotagging images and/or video?
Labels: creative commons, highways, open source software, roads
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Copyright by Tom Sayles.
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