Recently, Maxar has seen sharp usage increases through automated requests coming from a few areas of the world that are of concern. These are having detrimental impacts to our service and we are taking measures mitigate. Unfortunately this will mean an interruption of our imagery services for OpenStreetMap. Soon we will suspend our imagery service, and we are working with the developers of OSM editing tools to implement a more secure service and restore full access to the Maxar Standard and Premium layers as soon as possible.

Thank you for your understanding and we look forward to solving this problem together.

Best, Kevin

DigitalGlobe, now Maxar [1], is transitioning the OpenStreetMap imagery endpoints (from “DigitalGlobe Standard” to “Maxar Standard”; and from “DigitalGlobe Premium” to “Maxar Premium”). OSM users should see content parity between the old and the new layers by June 30, 2019. Starting July 1, 2019, there will be only two Maxar layers available from within the OSM editors – labeled with Beta.

Our new imagery services use http/2 protocol. Please note that there are some known speed issues with the JOSM editor. A JOSM plugin for http/2 support is expected before the end of July (ticket #17861). In the meantime, increasing the concurrent connections (e.g. to 20) will help. iD editor already supports http/2.

The good news: imagery will be more recent and more frequently updated with our latest Maxar mosaic content. We hope that our improved production processes (bundle block adjustment, atmospheric compensation, continuous updates, etc.) will benefit OSM contributors.

As always, thanks to everyone within OSM for all your support and feedback. Shout out to the maintainers and contributors for iD and JOSM who have been fantastic to work with. Look for Maxar at State of the Map and State of the Map US; we will be attending and presenting more information on this new image service. And please feel free to send us feedback. Happy editing!

[1] https://www.maxar.com/

Over the past few years, as I’ve attended State of the Map conferences, I’m consistently asked about satellite imagery: how it’s processed, accuracy, coverage, availability, resolution etc. I appreciate the fact that OpenStreetMap contributors are curious experts when it comes to satellite and aerial imagery. The reoccurring theme is: accurate, high-resolution and up-to-date satellite imagery is an essential component for improving this continuously evolving map of our planet – whether it’s to trace new features or to use as a reference layer for validation.   Over the past few months, we have been working with several of our partners that share the common goal of improving OpenStreetMap. To that end, they have generously funded the launch of a global imagery service powered by DigitalGlobe Maps API. This will open more data and more imagery to help aid OSM editing for OSM contributors. OSM contributors will see a new imagery source in addition to imagery being provided by our partners Bing and Mapbox. You will now see the following two image services from DigitalGlobe:

DigitalGlobe-Premium is a mosaic composed of DigitalGlobe basemap with select regions filled with +Vivid or custom area of interest imagery, 50cm resolution or better, and refreshed more frequently with ongoing updates

DigitalGlobe-Standard is a curated set of imagery covering 86% of the earth’s landmass, with 30-60cm or resolution where available, backfilled by Landsat. Average age is 2.31 years, with some areas updated 2x year.

We anticipate there will be questions and feedback and want to make sure they are being addressed. We already have an active forum with FAQs here https://mapsapidocs.digitalglobe.com/discuss. This post is replicated on OSM Forum and I’m available on OSM help or you can hit me up directly with any additional questions. We are working to provide metadata (image acquisition date) for all of the imagery provided. This will be a huge tool for OSM mappers. We are also going to post the imagery specification.

We appreciate the OSM community’s awareness and diligence for licensing, so we wanted to be clear on the intended uses for this service. We have a short human readable EULA to summarize terms for editing OpenStreetMap :

DigitalGlobe Satellite EULA: DigitalGlobe, Inc. is pleased to provide its high resolution satellite imagery to OpenStreetMap in support of its mapping initiatives. By using our imagery in the OSM editor, you understand and agree that you may only use our imagery to trace, and validate edits that must be contributed back to OSM. You cannot download our imagery or use our imagery for any other purpose. We retain all right, title and interest in and to our imagery. We provide our imagery “as is,” with all faults and as available; we disclaim all warranties, express or implied, to the extent permitted by applicable law. You can recover from us only direct damages up to an amount equal to the fees you have paid to us to use our imagery on OSM, if any. We are not liable for any other damages, including consequential, lost profits, special, indirect, incidental or punitive damages. Happy mapping!

Attribution should be source=DigitalGlobe

DG Blog post: http://blog.digitalglobe.com/news/digitalglobe-satellite-imagery-launch-for-openstreetmap/

Sincerely, Kevin Bullock