OldInsuranceMaps.net Joins OSM US as a Charter Project
Oldinsurancemaps.net is now a Charter Project
OpenStreetMap US has announced that OldInsuranceMaps.net (OIM), a platform hosting over 1,200 georeferenced Sanborn fire insurance maps from the Library of Congress, is now a Charter Project. Founded by Adam Cox in 2022, OIM makes these historical maps—valuable for tracing urban change from 1867 to the 1960s—accessible to hobbyists, researchers, and professionals. The project will collaborate with OpenHistoricalMap and Yesterdays, and welcomes volunteers to georeference maps or contribute via GitHub.
Our project exists to facilitate the creation of open historical map materials, and to do so in a way that is accessible, engaging, and robust.
- jakozaur
I wish AI leaders would fund more data archival projects, instead of hoarding it themselves. They could build a lot of goodwill, but the current state of the art is destroying old books and denying anyone access to them.
These archival projects have an enormous impact, though they are chronically underfunded. I wish there were a strong economic incentive to support them.
- okok3857
I started this project and couldn't be happier about this partnership with OSM US!
Also here's a past HN thread with some more context: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46788588
- arjie
If you're curious, the San Francisco Sanborn Maps are actually available directly from SF. Fun to look at https://sfplanninggis.org/pim/Sanborn.html?sanborn=V3P253.PD...
- lapetitejort
If you like OldInsuranceMaps, check out another OSM charter project, Yesterdays! Originally created by a team in Richmond, Virginia [0], with one more deployment covering the Inland Empire [1]. They plan to merge soon. Yesterdays imports Sanborn maps to help place historical photos as accurately as possible.
- walrus01
Seems like a very interesting challenge for automation of raster to vector scanning/software, and QC/checking that the raster-to-vector pipeline hasn't hallucinated something or joined two shapes together that should be discrete objects.
I would presume they're starting with very high res lossless raster scans and storing those in some sort of index, then making them available for different pipelines of processing?