okok3857

Joined 4 years ago

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Jun 3

currently working on oldinsurancemaps.net

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Comment · 2 months ago

People have georeferenced a lot of SF maps on OIM as well, you can explore them here: https://oldinsurancemaps.net/san-francisco-ca/

Comment · 2 months ago

Email sent, and thank you!

I should have mentioned this earlier, but folks can make direct tax-deductible donations to OldInsuranceMaps.net, which is now affiliated with OSM US's 501(c)(3) status.

https://openstreetmap.app.neoncrm.com/forms/donate-oim

Comment · 2 months ago

That's basically what's going on, but it's all a manual process so far. The goal is scoped really just to the actual georeferencing and mosaic creation, no post-processing or OCR is performed on the maps within this platform (people are certainly downloading the final rasters and doing that with them though).

Comment · 2 months ago

Absolutely, this would be incredibly cool, and if they can do it with burnt ancient scrolls it should be a cakewalk with these... Even just shining very strong light behind the pages you can see all the old layers. However, most of the LoC collection is original copyright deposits, so much of what's on OIM doesn't have pasted-on slips.

Comment · 2 months ago

This is something we need to add to the FAQ. There is some cross-compatibility already, in that OIM has endpoints to spit out Allmaps-compatible annotations from the database, e.g. https://oldinsurancemaps.net/iiif/resource/88127/. You can paste that right into Allmaps, which will in turn pull tiles from the Library of Congress IIIF server and warp them based on the annotation information. That's just the beginning though, more to come...

Comment · 2 months ago

I started this project and couldn't be happier about this partnership with OSM US!

Also here's a past HN thread with some more context: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46788588

Comment · 3 months ago

Rapid Editor is a good web app for editing OSM: https://rapideditor.org/

Comment · 9 months ago

Thanks for sharing, this is really nice. I've added it to the list of other projects I have on the site [0]. Feel free to get in touch if you want to use OIM for other years of Paris, TX.

[0] https://oldinsurancemaps.net/more-about-sanborn-maps/

Comment · 9 months ago

Thanks! Frankly the presentation side of the site needs a lot of work, and it's more about doing the georeferencing work, which sounds like you've already done. But you should get in touch I'd love to discuss further! I've done demo projects with old plat maps like you are working with.

Comment · 9 months ago

Yes, some maps in the site are hidden as they are part of an ongoing research project, just happens that Tampa and Key West are both examples of that. If you follow the blog/newsletter I'll surely announce when those are available.

Comment · 9 months ago

Yes, at certain points, like when I made that ohmg.dev website, I have looked at this as a re-deployable platform that anyone could self-host. It still technically is, but I've slowed down a lot on that idea (no one really showed up with interest). There are other good places to georeference maps on the web, like mapwarper.net and allmaps.org. That said, I do hope to expand to handle import of other atlases, not only Sanborns, and if you have something particular in mind you can mention it here: https://github.com/ohmg-dev/OldInsuranceMaps/issues/266

Comment · 9 months ago

No (or, not yet...) and yes, I know the Allmaps team well--it is an excellent project. There are a lot of similarities, but I would say two high-level differences are 1) OIM is built around server-side processing that immediately produces downloadable files and web services (geotiffs) while Allmaps applies a client-side transformation to non-geo IIIF tiles, and 2) OIM is designed around the creation of mosaics from many different pages to a greater extent than Allmaps is. This year I do see bringing more IIIF/Allmaps tooling into OIM though, so stay tuned!

Comment · 9 months ago

Hi! I added a page about "georeference-a-thons" recently here: https://oldinsurancemaps.net/community-georeferencing/

Comment · 9 months ago

Yes, there are a number of maps (the FHA ones and also one Sanborn) that are part of a research project that is still in the works, so they are hidden for now.

Comment · 9 months ago

Great question: no. I've spent a lot more time making the georeferencing side of things work well than improving search and discovery, and even presentation (like the /viewer/ pages), of the maps on the site. It's something I hope to spend a lot more time on in the coming months. I know, dealing with those sliders is pretty cumbersome in big cities with many volumes (like SF).