[klamann]

I love that the OpenStreetMap community provides a mature toolscape that allows projects like this to access geospatial data for anyone, no questions asked. It's hard to overstate how valuable this kind of resource is to the free software community.

Just to give some perspective: More than 10 years ago I built an open source project that generates cities for a different game (maps4cim [1], a map generator for Cities in Motion 2). It relies on OSM data to generate roads and buildings and stuff, and NASA SRTM data for elevations. The OSM part of the application is far more complicated, since it covers so much data that is changing every day, yet you can make the exact same query against the Overpass API and get a response with the latest data in the expected format. NASA however at some point decided to shut down public access to SRTM data, which is in the public domain, and hide it behind a non-RESTful webservice where only registered users have access.

To me this feels like such a loss. I never would have started this open source project a decade ago if there was no free access to all the data the users would need. Yes, it's still public domain data, therefore someone could go through all the hassle of signing up for the service, scrape all the data and then host it free of charge, but right now there is no such service. Don't get me wrong, I don't feel entitled to this kind of free service, but I feel like these barriers to entry really matter and we all lose access to great tools that are built on the shoulders of giants. Very sad to lose NASA as one of the giants that once gave us free and easy access to highly useful data. More power to projects like OSM that live the spirit of open data!

1: https://github.com/Klamann/maps4cim

[raybb]

It's also pretty amazing how easy it is to contribute. Between things like street complete with gamified quests and the browser based editor on osm.org basically anyone with an internet connection can update the places around them in minutes.

That being said, the fact that there's always something to fix just about anywhere I go tells you there's not enough people that contribute. Tbh I think the major problem is that there's no single go to app that people use all the time and then notice the issues. Though that's changing a bit with Organic Maps. Tesla self parking also had a bunch of new people mapping places, or so I heard.

[m4rtink]

Looks like its is possible to download the full SRTM dataset - would that not work ?

https://www.reddit.com/r/gis/comments/qg4b6j/is_it_possible_...

Also I know Geonames has a service for elevation lookup based on SRTM & other data: http://www.geonames.org/export/web-services.html

But if you need to semple a big are in detail, that could potentially run into API limits or overload the service. But it demonstrates its possible to get the dataset & provide an API on top of it by a third party. :)

[m4rtink]

Some more information from DRL, which was apparently involved in the mission:

https://geoservice.dlr.de/web/dataguide/srtm/

https://download.geoservice.dlr.de/SRTM_XSAR/

[klamann]

I did a quick review of the resources that you linked to:

https://portal.opentopography.org/raster?opentopoID=OTSRTM.0... allows to submit a request for data from a specific area through a web form (no REST API), then you get redirected to a page where you get a download link after your request has been processed. Does not give access to the original SRTM data.

http://www.geonames.org/export/web-services.html exposes SRTM data through a REST API in their own custom format. I immediately ran into rate limiting when I tried to download a small map tile.

https://download.geoservice.dlr.de/SRTM_XSAR/ provides free access to SRTM data in the original format. This is a great resource! Unfortunately, the map tiles cover 10x10 degrees, which results in huge files. NASA used to provide 1x1 degree tiles, which was much better suited for on-demand access.

https://download.geoservice.dlr.de/TDM30_EDEM/ DLR does provide 1x1 degree tiles for similar data sets like TanDEM-X, but for those they do not provide anonymous access.