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Georgy Potapov: “I am a professional OpenStreetMap data consumer”



— - , . GeoAlert, . OSM, — .

- When and how did you meet the OpenStreetMap project?

- In 2009, when I, together with my colleagues, launched a startup - the Kosmosnimki online store, in which we tried to sell satellite images. For the site and a number of projects, we needed maps. As a result, the choice fell on OpenStreetMap.

Why on him? Firstly, then it was a fairly fresh, dynamic and developing project, around which something interesting always happened. Many of today's well-known GIS tools and technologies appeared precisely in the bowels of its communities. Secondly, at one time, guys who were active participants in OSM and had a good understanding of it worked with us.

- Do you yourself map in OSM?

“No, but I haven’t done that much before.” For informational purposes, of course, I made some changes to OSM. By nature, I am very lazy, my crush was enough only to draw a few houses. Rather, I am a professional OSM data consumer. At present, at GeoAlert, in one of the projects, we make data sets for machine learning from them, but at the same time, I am a responsible and grateful data consumer.

Let me remind you that at one time Kosmosnimki provided for OSM a number of satellite images of Russia and related countries completely free of charge. It seems to me that then it helped the Russian OSM community, because it had no other alternative of the same quality.

- Why did you decide to share satellite images with OSM?

- There were several reasons. First, we ourselves used OSM in our work and we wanted it to be more accurate and complete.

Second, we received quite a lot of requests from various users with requests to share satellite images, including from the OSM community. At first, such letters seemed presumptuous to us, but then we realized that volunteers were writing to us, who draw a map for free and don’t make money on it.

The third is prosaic. You need to understand that for us Kosmosnimki was still a business project, that is, we wanted to earn on the sale of satellite images. No matter how sad it may sound, but we shared with OSM what we could not sell - pictures with a resolution of 6 meters per pixel. Now it sounds ridiculous, but then only the Landsat satellite image was available for rendering at OSM, the quality of which was more than two times worse - 15 meters per pixel.

- What was OSM then? What is he like now?

- As I said, ten years ago OSM set trends in the world of geoinformatics and determined the direction of the GIS market development, because everything new appeared in his community. However, I suppose that this was also due to the fact that then, on the whole, the cartography and navigation market was actively growing. Therefore, the attention of many people was riveted to all that was happening in the OSM world.
Now this market has stabilized, there are no violent explosions and waves. It seems to me that similar processes are taking place in OSM itself, which has already ceased to be a technological legislator. The initiative passed to large companies that have learned to make money on it, such as Mapbox. Now OSM is primarily a database. Perhaps for the sake of this, everything was started.

- How would you rate this database?

- It all depends on the specific situation and your task. If you are looking for a map for a small or, conversely, global project or are studying a GIS, then OSM is ideal for this, because it is free. If you need incredible accuracy and the completeness of the data is critical, you should look towards paid providers. In OSM itself, of course, there is a lot of different information, only it does not lie on the surface. In order to get it, you have to tinker: study the tags, read the documentation - in a word, spend time. In addition, OSM data is not evenly distributed across territories. One city may be well rendered and the other poorly rendered.

- As far as I know, you once advocated that the authorities in Russia more actively use OSM in their work. Can you tell us more about this?

- Several times he suggested that the Ministry of Emergencies pay attention to OSM and the experience of the humanitarian team OSM (HOTOSM), which is involved in situational mapping during emergencies. Unfortunately, no success was achieved in this matter.

- What do you think this is connected with?

- The authorities of Russia, in general, are quite closed, and therefore any proposal for cooperation on the part of citizens is perceived with suspicion. If we talk about the Ministry of Emergencies, then this is not a civilian department to the end. Rather, let’s say so, they gravitate to power structures, and therefore this attitude is closed. We tried to establish contact with them, share data, and help deal with OSM, but this did not find the proper response. Although it is known that the Ministry of Emergencies, one way or another, unofficially, uses OSM in its work, because the GIS, which they must use by law, is not of the best quality.

- In the world of cartography, a new trend is the automatic recognition of objects in satellite images. Why has it become so fashionable now? Many began to do this.

- This has become massive and popular due to the availability and low cost of computing resources, as well as the emergence of new neural network architectures that most developers can handle. By the way, as I already said, one of the data sources for training such neural network models for recognizing objects on remote sensing data is a map - and just OSM, which in turn is free, is such a source, and accessible to absolutely anyone.

- How automatic is this process now? Or do you still need a man?

- So far, technologies have not reached such a level that a good and accurate map is immediately output. Still, as long as a person is needed, he is the last link in the data creation chain - he makes the final decision: is the object recognized correctly or not. A similar scheme, for example, was implemented in a pilot project Facebook, which recently developed its own online editor with a neural network - RapiD . But even in this case, when there is a validation stage, this already allows several times to accelerate the work of the cartographer. However, the day is not so far when the machine is compared in quality with a person and even overtakes him in routine work. After all, she cannot be tired or inattentive, unlike a person.

Last summer, if you remember, a flood occurred in the Irkutsk region. Our company promptly generated data for this region using fresh satellite images (they are freely available on GitHub ). Why did we do this? They wanted to help the Ministry of Emergency Situations in compiling a disaster map, as they suggested that they did not have such data, and in OSM that territory was empty. Six months later, we launched a project to digitize buildings throughout Russia, re-processed the Irkutsk region, compared the results and confirmed the improvement in the quality of the algorithms.

- Is your company ready to share automatic data with OSM?

- Ready, we’re just thinking about how to do it right from a legal point of view. It is possible that for OSM we will produce a separate data set that will be compatible with its license. So far, unfortunately, I can’t reveal more details. The main thing is that we are interested in this, since we ourselves are actively using OSM.



- Before the New Year, there was news that you have extensively tested your algorithm - you recognized objects from satellite images in Russia. Can you share the results of this work?

- Our neural network found 54.5 million objects in the country, which it classified as a building. At the same time, only 18 million buildings were contributed to OSM in Russia. Already, the difference is 3 times. It is possible that she is even bigger.

The situation is similar in the USA. Microsoft Neural Networkdiscovered 125 million buildings when there were 33 million in OSM. Therefore, such neural networks have a great future in cartography.


The ratio of the number of buildings recognized by the neural network to those mapped in OSM

- How do you plan to use the results of your work - recognized objects? What can be done with them, besides putting on a map?

- We have an open project on GitHub, where we gradually upload the data sets that we generated automatically. After we discovered the object, the next task is validation and filling, because few people need the contours of the building in our time. We also do this with the help of various open sources, for example, OSM and Housing and Utilities Reforms. If it turns out that the object we generated is contained in OSM, then we replace it with data from OSM.

We ourselves plan to use them to create an application that can be useful for territorial planning and management. Roughly speaking, it will be such a service, with the help of which it will be possible to trace the dynamics of construction throughout the country or a specific region over several years, to obtain more complete statistics than there are in official reports. These are some examples of the use of such data.

- Does your system somehow classify recognized objects? Or gives out only the contours of the building?

- So far, only in a simplified form. We have learned to qualitatively separate residential buildings from non-residential, and multi-storey from private. The site has a demoversion in which anyone can verify this himself by starting processing on the territory of interest to him. But now we are working on a more detailed classification by type of building and post-processing, we also hope that this year we will add algorithms for detecting and classifying the road network. In addition, a series of algorithms for recognizing vegetation, mainly forest, but so far the main priority is development.

- What would you say to other entrepreneurs and copyright holders in response to the question: “Why and why should you open your data to OSM?”?

“I can only share my personal story.” Despite the fact that I have been engaged in the development of geo-services for many years, I am not so rich as to maintain my own cartographic production or buy absolutely all the data. And in our past company, and in the current, we used and continue to use OSM as a cartographic database. Therefore, it is important for me that it develops further. Now even large companies have turned their attention to OSM and are trying to take part in its fate, for example, Facebook and Microsoft.

If you are taking some data from OSM, then think about how to make it better. What for? So that there is competition, so that on the day when you need some data, you can freely take it from OSM and use it in your business. This is especially important for small independent companies.

If we do not do open information projects, then we will miss very important competitive advantages. This is akin to a fear of public speaking. This fear must be overcome at some point and begin to spread something in the public domain. And even more so, this must be done if you do not want to become a victim of a large corporate business. I would like small independent players to still remain in our market.

- Why do large OSM companies?

- I can assume that Facebook has reached a certain saturation limit in developed countries, and in developing countries, in order to correctly formulate a promotion strategy, it lacks various basic data, including spatial data, so it takes them from where they are - from OSM . Why don't they make their own map, like Apple or Google? I do not know. But while this alternative path looks noble - they not only take data, but also contribute to OSM. By the way, they are not the only ones to do this. More and more companies are conscious and eventually share data with OSM.

- What do you say at the end of the conversation?

- OSM is a huge non-profit project that combines many different areas, both technological and social. And for me this is one of the projects where I feel like part of the story and the community. Even the smallest part of it. But this feeling persists for a long time. In addition, this project introduced me to many people with whom I still not only communicate, but also make friends. Such emotions and human connections can give only an open source project. Therefore, not only Facebook, as he claims, connects people, but also such open creative projects in which people create something together. This is another argument in favor of the fact that it is worth investing in such projects.


Communication of Russian OpenStreetMap participants is in the Telegram chat room and on the forum .
There are also groups on social networks VKontakte , Facebook , but they mainly publish news.

→ Join OSM!


Previous interviews: Vladimir Marshinin , Evgeny Usvitsky , wowik , SviMik , Kirill Bondarenko , Artem Svetlov , Sergey Sinitsyn , Natalya Kozlovskaya , Victor Vyalichkin , Ivan aka BANO.notIT , Anton Belichkov , Elena Balashova , Ilya Zverev , Timofey Subbotin , Sergey Golubev .

Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/undefined/

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