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Great stuff, at some point I feel like Google is going to have to try to extract even more revenue out of maps than they currently get and it will really empowe

Great stuff, at some point I feel like Google is going to have to try to extract even more revenue out of maps than they currently get and it will really empower these sorts of collaborative map systems. I wish there was a way for people to fund satellite imagery that got pushed into these systems after purchase. Sunnyvale, for example, paid for a lot of imagery of the city that they use/used in staff discussions about traffic, zoning, etc. It would be nice if they could then push those images into the open data set.

Kadin 3y ago
There's really no technical reason why imagery like that couldn't be contributed, and IIRC Google does use municipally-owned imagery in its products. A single city might not be a big enough source for them to bother, I don't know, but I know particularly in Europe I have seen copyright notices for national and regional governments when looking at imagery. Though there are a lot of sources for satellite imagery right now; Google may not be that hard-up for new stuff. I suspect the commercial vendors they work with probably image the entire CONUS area every 12 months or so. The imagery that would seem to be more in-demand would be the aerial photos used at very high zoom levels. I'm not a geospatial expert but I think these images are combined with some sort of LIDAR or multi-spectrum imagery to have height maps in tandem with the visuals. That strikes me as pretty expensive to obtain.