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Openly Licensed Streetview with Panoramax
Bastian Greshake Tzovaras is a researcher with a background in biology and citizen science and an open science activist. He works as a senior researcher at The Alan Turing Institute. In 2011, he founded openSNP. He was awarded a PhD in Bioinformatics in 2018. In 2017 he joined the Open Humans Foundation as the Director of Research.
Street-level images are not just a great way to virtually explore places (or for playing the not-so-occasional round of GeoGuessr), but are also extremely useful for providing detailed local information when contributing to OpenStreetMap. While, back when street-view imagery first started out, a lot of specialised equipment was needed to get GPS-registered, 360º images, today there’s at least somewhat affordable 360º consumer cameras that directly write GPS coordinates too. Supported and developed by the Geocommons Factory of the French National Institute of Geographic and Forest Information(IGN), each part of the whole Panoramax street-level imagery pipeline is openly licensed: From the different modes of uploading data (there’s a web uploader and a CLI tool already), over the backand and the embeddable viewer, to the data itself.
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