OpenStreetMap
Scanex to grant OSM access to IRS satellite imagery
Posted by glebius on 3 December 2009 in English.Here are some very good news for mappers in Russia.
Today, at the last day of "Earth from the Space" forum, which was held in Moscow, the Scanex (scanex.ru) granted OpenStreetMap access to their IRS satellite imagery layer. IRS spans almost entire Russia and also touches Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan. Its resolution is 6 m per pixel, which allows mappers to see any paved road and even some tracks, streets in small villages, and precise boundaries of woods and lakes.
There is no official WMS yet. There is going to be one in future, either Scanex will provide a JOSM plugin to access their tiles directly. However, we have written tiny WMS-gates to Scanex, that can be used by mappers right now:
http://glebius.int.ru/wms/irs?
http://wms.latlon.org/?layer=irs&
Discussion
Comment from JohnSmith on 3 December 2009 at 21:14
They don't need to make a plugin to access tiles, they just need to file a bug against the slippymap plugin with the relevant URL to access the tiles. This was recently done for NearMap.com imagery in Australia.
Comment from greencaps on 3 December 2009 at 23:52
Very nice. But how to use these links? With the first a bbbox parameter is expected and then..
With the second a green jpg appears...
Where is info how to use them?
Comment from glebius on 4 December 2009 at 06:50
JohnSmith. haven't RTFS yet, but I suppose slippymap plugin expects merkartor projection on sphere. Scanex uses projection on WGS84 ellipsoid. So, calculating Y<->Latitude is different, and thus just adding an URL won't work. Probably slippymap plugin can be patched to gain support of non-sphere projections.
greencaps, you just need to insert this link in josm configuration. F12 -> choose WMS tab on the left, click "Add" button.
Comment from greencaps on 4 December 2009 at 09:20
Sorry glebius. I have only heard of JOSM but never used it. I make my own programs. The only thing that's missing in that url are some parameters. Please give some full working urls. For instance how to get tiles. Or a link to the used api.
Comment from katpatuka on 5 December 2009 at 05:30
What's the coverage of scanex? I tried to use it on Yakutsk but no satellite imagery came up - with glebius.int.ru only 404 files.
Comment from glebius on 5 December 2009 at 07:16
Sorry I was too optimistic about its coverage. Asia is covered less than 10%. Here is coverage picture:
http://img146.imageshack.us/img146/3251/irsmap.jpg
Scanex says that in future there would be updates.
Comment from richlv on 8 December 2009 at 18:03
excellent, this even covers some small areas in latvia
maybe the company plans to expand in europe ? :)
Comment from datalogg on 8 December 2009 at 21:15
Thanks for the WMS URLs, I'm using them in JOSM right now for some armchair mapping!
Comment from richlv on 9 December 2009 at 09:09
btw, using first wms url in josm, imagery seems to be ~ 50m off to the south for the region i'm interested in. would anybody be interested in a report about that ?
Comment from glebius on 9 December 2009 at 09:56
This is known. The shift is not constant across the Russia, so we can't add a fix on the server side. Users should use closemost GPS traces to tie imagery precisely before any editing session.