> You can pretty much get a 3d map of the world with 5m accuracy
I'm having trouble locating high res DEM files. I can easily find arc second granular data (~30m accuracy at my latitude), but beyond that, it appears it's locked down for academic use or by request only. Where are you getting these freely available datasets?
I'm not a GIS person, I dabble in map stuff for personal use, so forgive me if I'm missing something obvious somewhere.
The lack of high res DEM files angers me a lot as well. 30m simply isn't enough and then there are projects like TanDEM-X where it isn't clear why they can't share the 12m x 12m data with the public if it's mostly payed through public funding.
If you are in the US, the USGS compiles best available data into 3dep. It's pretty amazing when it's recent Lidar (like you can see hiking trails or where they built temporary logging railroads 100+ years ago).
Yes, I agree that data balkanization represents a significant hindrance for further development of openstreetmap. Fifteen or so years ago I was experimenting with importing DEM files from the US into Blender for landscaping, and finding the data was frustrating. Sometimes the data was available at a state website, other times at a federal website, sometimes also available on the website of some mapping program/project. Surveys within a given geopolitical constraint would be found on the website of whichever department provided the funding. I understanding that, even if ignoring legal realities, merging this data into a single "ground" (heh) truth would be a herculean task, scientifically. But there was no common database or delivery method. Some departments would link to FTP sites, other would provide arcgis downloads via an interactive web tool. I'd have to depend on user-maintained blog posts to even find the data. And the best data was always locked away behind secure portals that I couldn't get access to.
Nowadays openstreetmap is running into the same problem at the municipality level. In the US, if I understand correctly, publicly-funded geographic surveys are under copyright to whichever governing entity and not eligible for import into openstreetmap.
Take for example the excellent app Every Door (https://github.com/Zverik/every_door) with a focus on easily adding building information. In the US, openstreetmap has no address information. Either that or very little address information - but none in my area. So it'd be easy for me to add building nodes with house numbers but I won't be doing that. Not only is it a massive commitment, but the data is already available at openaddresses.io. The catch? It's "probably" license-compatible with openstreetmap. Before merging, all that data would have to be reviewed by a team of lawyers. That's not something a software developer can help with.
In existing threads here, a top complaint about OsmAnd is that lack of address information. Try planning a route without addresses, and without constantly switching to Google Maps to convert addresses to coordinates. Not very user friendly! Opensupermaps (https://github.com/pnoll1/osmand_map_creation) is a user-maintained merge of openstreetmaps and openaddresses.io, but it doesn't integrate with OsmAnd's data update system.
And that's how data balkanization is breaking openstreetmap, right now.
I'm having trouble locating high res DEM files. I can easily find arc second granular data (~30m accuracy at my latitude), but beyond that, it appears it's locked down for academic use or by request only. Where are you getting these freely available datasets?
I'm not a GIS person, I dabble in map stuff for personal use, so forgive me if I'm missing something obvious somewhere.