OpenStreetMap
Since it is possible or even probable that Yahoo! is changing owners, I am now tracing stuff from their aerial photos that they allow us to derive maps from. Who knows what happens with that agreement in the future.
I concentrated on features that are hard to reach, like the banks of rivers (I traced the Neckar up to Remseck); or do not have a name, like tracks in vineyards.
Discussion
Comment from daveemtb on 7 February 2008 at 17:54
Interesting thought. For what it's worth, the low resolution Yahoo images are in fact Landsat images. So, we will still be able to access those. The high res areas could be more of an issue I think.
Talking of Yahoo and Landsat, does anyone else find that the Yahoo WMS in JOSM is slightly more accurate in terms of offset from GPS data than the Landsat WMS?
Comment from Brian Schimmel on 8 February 2008 at 00:37
Well, if we now are allowed to use Yahoo!, can they really forbid it in future? Of course, they can make the access to it impossible for us. Since the high resolution images cover only few areas, could we make a simple copy of the images, tracing them later? Or the question might be: Are we allowed to do this? Still got 95 GB free memory on my hard disk :)
Comment from ColinMarquardt on 8 February 2008 at 00:48
Brian: AFAIK the agreement is so that it's not allowed to cache the images permanently. That's the reason the YWMS plugin for JOSM is working like it is. And forbid... they just need to change the license and include a little sentence I would guess.
Comment from amapanda ᚛ᚐᚋᚐᚅᚇᚐ᚜ 🏳️🌈 on 8 February 2008 at 16:17
The high resolution images are the most important parts. With the high res images you can trace to street level. With only Landsat you can't make out any detail in a town or city.
Brian, no you are not allowed to just download all the images. They are copyrighted. Yahoo have kindly agreed to let the OSM project base some street outlines against them. That doesn't mean the OSM project can just copy them willy nilly.
Comment from colonia on 9 February 2008 at 20:03
I had the same thought last week, so i spend some hours mapping power lines and more than 600 power towers in the area around cologne, an easy job with the hi-res sat-images.