Oldinsurancemaps.net is now a Charter Project

Anthropic just learned to the tune of a 1.5 billion dollar settlement that making available for human consumption, even internally, instead of hoarding for AI training exclusively is a fraught exercise.

SourceLibrary.org for instance… how to make what is done there an economic value for AI companies with data for training?

Everything is "chronically underfunded". There has never been a thing in the world that was "well funded" because people's objectives increase with the amount of money they have. No one has ever said "Wikipedia has enough now" or "The Internet Archive doesn't really need any more money" or "Firefox has collected enough money from Google that it can now operate independently forever".

Besides, this so-called goodwill is an illusion. Opposition to AI in the PR space is entirely dominated by motivated reasoning. Attempting to satisfy people with random things is simply going to shift complaints to "take the commons, chop it up, and give it back to us"; "Should AI companies be the arbiters of what is worth preserving?"; and other such things. These kind of public-relation gains are entirely fictive and neither the supposed beneficiary nor the supposed benefactor is fooled by the theory.

"Oh so they suck up all our water and burn our planet down and we're supposed to be happy that they chop up people's books (that humans spent years creating) just so they can give us digested slop back?". Everyone knows that this sentence is waiting in the wings, and that the entire effort is clearly bait so that someone is foolish enough to pull a Google Books and get sued into oblivion for it.

And that's saying nothing about this so-called "hoarding" of things in a world where we pulp tons of these hoarded things every day and no one cares to scan them.

How does wasting money on public goods deliver value to shareholders or help you build a doomsday machine?

I was very excited to see this project. I went to the site and requested processing of the maps for my small town. It also inspired me to make a donation to OSM.

Awesome project! Would definitely love to see more overlap with Allmaps. It’s pretty trivial to utilize centralized gcps for both server and client applications and maintain single sources of truth. I’ve been meaning to dive a bit deeper on an old project anyway, good excuse.

People have georeferenced a lot of SF maps on OIM as well, you can explore them here: https://oldinsurancemaps.net/san-francisco-ca/

That's basically what's going on, but it's all a manual process so far. The goal is scoped really just to the actual georeferencing and mosaic creation, no post-processing or OCR is performed on the maps within this platform (people are certainly downloading the final rasters and doing that with them though).

Absolutely, this would be incredibly cool, and if they can do it with burnt ancient scrolls it should be a cakewalk with these... Even just shining very strong light behind the pages you can see all the old layers. However, most of the LoC collection is original copyright deposits, so much of what's on OIM doesn't have pasted-on slips.

Sanborn was an insurance adjacent company that made detailed paper maps of many towns in the US in the late 1800s and early 1900s.

This project is scanning those maps and adding the information that modern mapping software needs to show them alongside other geographic information. Where the old paper maps overlap, they work to cleanly stitch them together rather than showing the edges of the paper.

Later: The project is sort of for people looking for the old maps, so I can see why the introduction doesn't spend a life of time explaining them.

ELI5:

They are building computer programs that other people can use to then post online maps from old paper sources. For example, from the Sanborn map collection.

Those maps can be browsed as "overlays" on top of other maps, so you can easily compare how several maps show the same places on Earth.

They make a nice way of stitching together old maps.