[femto]

I'd anticipate that OSM will get machine vision in the future. Consider that that a typical phone/tablet now has a GPS, camera and decent computing resources. It's begging for a machine vision application, which records video and automatically extracts mapping information, ready for uploading to OSM. Begging to the point, where I think it's just a matter of time.

As an aside, are there any efforts afoot to decentralise OSM? It seems well suited to a geographically distributed database, with each country/area looking after it's own map, and the whole being drawn together by a common markup language. Assembling a global map would be a matter of crawling a network of servers, rather than downloading from a single source.

[a3_nm]

> It's begging for a machine vision application, which records video and...

A simpler use case for computer vision I could think of with Openstreetmap would be to automatically extract roads and building shapes from satellite imagery (though I hope that the license to use Bing would extend to something like this).

> As an aside, are there any efforts afoot to decentralise OSM?

Well, even Wikipedia's not decentralized yet and has no obvious plans to, so...

[ZeroGravitas]

Automatic tracing of roads from Bing provided aerial photos, with code provided by MSFT, 18 months ago:

http://youtu.be/LR0WV2dGIRc

http://magicshop.cloudapp.net/Default.aspx

[yellowbkpk]

Speaking as someone that wrote some code that interfaces with the Magicshop API, it works nowhere near as good as described in the video. It's a simple color matching algorithm that gets easily fooled by trees and dry grass.

The project is a great start, but has basically been abandoned.

[ZeroGravitas]

I think the more important point though, is that both the permission and imagery is there (and the imagery is very high quality) so there's various other projects that e.g. trace outlines of lakes from the imagery (again basic color matching) or identify tennis courts via computer vision etc.

[rmc]

I don't think there are any plans to decentralize OSM. There is no reason to decentralize it, it would solve no problems, and would cause a whole pile of new problems. From technical to political (what's a country?)