Several years ago, Esri made its World Imagery map accessible through OSM editors such as iD and JOSM. The goal of this was to give OSM mappers some additional options for high-res imagery when creating and editing features in OSM.

The Esri World Imagery map is compiled from multiple sources, including Maxar satellite imagery as well as aerial imagery from various GIS organizations (e.g. cities, counties, states/provinces, etc.). In general, the World Imagery map is curated to feature the most recent imagery we have available for a given area, though we do retain some older imagery for a while if it is better in other respects (e.g. currency, clarity).

The World Imagery map is updated every few weeks with the latest imagery that we’ve assembled and processed. During a release, we replace the current set of image tiles with a new set of image tile for several areas where we have updates. For example, in our most recent update, we updated the imagery in Western Europe with the latest Maxar imagery.

For most users and use cases, these updates are a good thing because they provide access to more current imagery. In some cases, however, it may be less desirable. The latest imagery may be more current, but it may also be more cloudy for a specific location, or the imagery might have shifted a few meters relative to existing features in the OSM data. In these cases, the previous or even older imagery may be preferred for editing. The older imagery may include the features you are editing with better clarity or relative accuracy. This is why many of us compare imagery background layers when editing OSM data for a given area.

World Imagery Wayback

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During the Esri User Conference, Esri and Facebook today announced the availability of ArcGIS datasets in updated versions of two OSM editors, RapiD and JOSM. You can check out the Esri blog post and Facebook blog post for details, but I also wanted to provide a little more context and contact info for the OSM community.

In addition to the local knowledge and field surveys of OSM contributors, another source of OSM data is government data that has been released with appropriate licenses. Many government agencies in the United States and around the world are Esri customers, and they use ArcGIS software to create, publish, and share their GIS data.

Esri would like to help OSM mappers by providing more convenient access to this type of data where it would be useful in OSM and it can be provided with an appropriate license. Esri is encouraging our ArcGIS user community to share their data as open data, preferably with licenses that are compatible with OSM.

In the past few months, Esri has identified some open data (e.g. building footprints and address points) that can be used in OSM and processed that data so that it is more ready-to-use in OSM. To enable access to this data for OSM mappers, Esri has worked with developers at Facebook to expose this data in OSM editors through a new version of RapiD and an updated Map With AI plugin for JOSM.

As described in the Esri blog post, these tools will enable OSM mappers to choose a dataset they’d like to use for mapping, select a feature in the dataset that does not currently exist in OSM, review the geometry and available fields (tags) for the feature (such as below) and make adjustments based on local knowledge or other appropriate sources as needed, and then upload their changes to OSM.

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