Oldinsurancemaps.net is now a Charter Project

jakozaur

I wish AI leaders would fund more data archival projects, instead of hoarding it themselves. They could build a lot of goodwill, but the current state of the art is destroying old books and denying anyone access to them. These archival projects have an enormous impact, though they are chronically underfunded. I wish there were a strong economic incentive to support them.

chofmann

Fantastic project.

chirau

On visiting the actual oldinsurancemaps.net, I was met with: "OldInsuranceMaps.net is a Charter Project of OpenStreetMap US that provides an open, online workflow for creating georeferenced layers of historical maps, with a special focus on making seamless mosaics from multi-page atlases in the Sanborn map collection at the Library of Congress." What the hell does that mean? Anyone to ELI5?

marten31

Having these maps under a charter means long-term maintenance isn't just one person's side project anymore.

hnvd8v0o2d

Been thinking about this for years

tharos47

If you like old maps you can check the french maps with historical layers (17xx, 1880, 1950, today) : https://cartes.gouv.fr/explorer-les-cartes/ you can add and remove layers by clicking on the map icon on the top right.

darvo31

Great resource. Fire insurance maps are goldmines for urban history research.

hncbw02z5a

Solid, no complaints

ufocia

Would be great to non-destructively scan the lower layers and date code them at some point, if/when possible.

walrus01

Seems like a very interesting challenge for automation of raster to vector scanning/software, and QC/checking that the raster-to-vector pipeline hasn't hallucinated something or joined two shapes together that should be discrete objects. I would presume they're starting with very high res lossless raster scans and storing those in some sort of index, then making them available for different pipelines of processing?

okok3857

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

lapetitejort

If you like OldInsuranceMaps, check out another OSM charter project, Yesterdays! Originally created by a team in Richmond, Virginia [0], with one more deployment covering the Inland Empire [1]. They plan to merge soon. Yesterdays imports Sanborn maps to help place historical photos as accurately as possible. 0: https://yesterdays.maprva.org/ 1: https://yesterdays.inlandempire.place/

arjie

If you're curious, the San Francisco Sanborn Maps are actually available directly from SF. Fun to look at https://sfplanninggis.org/pim/Sanborn.html?sanborn=V3P253.PD...