alt Hacker NewsOldinsurancemaps.net is now a Charter Project
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Great resource. Fire insurance maps are goldmines for urban history research.
If you like old maps you can check the french maps with historical layers (17xx, 1880, 1950, today) :
https://cartes.gouv.fr/explorer-les-cartes/
you can add and remove layers by clicking on the map icon on the top right.
Having these maps under a charter means long-term maintenance isn't just one person's side project anymore.
Been thinking about this for years
测试
On visiting the actual oldinsurancemaps.net, I was met with:
"OldInsuranceMaps.net is a Charter Project of OpenStreetMap US that provides an open, online workflow for creating georeferenced layers of historical maps, with a special focus on making seamless mosaics from multi-page atlases in the Sanborn map collection at the Library of Congress."
What the hell does that mean? Anyone to ELI5?
Fantastic project.
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.