Opening up streetlevel imagery

With OpenStreetMap Belgium and our umbrella Open Knowledge Belgium, we have been lobbying to get governments to collect their street level imagery in the open.

While there are many projects to collect images, almost allways the government does not retain ownership of the imagery. Instead of paying for data collection, they pay for access to the data. This means the price is low for the individual governement organization, but in our complicated political landscape of federal, regional, provincial, intercommunal, or communal organizations, many are buying access individually. In the end, the total cost for the tax payer is higher, without there being any open products that can benefit the rest of society.

We believe payment for the data collection should happen only once, and ownership of the imagery should be transferred to the government. This would result in the lowest cost overal. By releasing the imagery as open data, its value for society is increased even more. Access to extra services can incentivise governements to pay up for the base data collection.

Slow progress

While the intercommunal organization WVI (Dutch text) has contributed open 360° imagery for most of the industrial areas in West-Flanders, and three Flemish municipalities have shared 360° imagery taken by Vansteelandt, the vast majority of projects that we hear about do not result in open data.

This is why in 2022 we are launching the Open StreetLevel Imagery Project. We are scaling up our efforts to crowdsource open street level imagery at a low cost. We are investing a very small budget which we expect to have a significant impact.

The OpenStreetMap Belgium role

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