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habi

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I'm a generic geek and an ex-messenger with a PhD in ultrahigh resolution tomography. I love the outdoors, taking photos and much more than it's possible to pack into two sentences.

More links can be found on http://davidhaberthür.ch

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However, even ALPR doesn't show any devices for me

I've panned the map over several parts of the US, and see many ALPRs mapped in OpenStreetMap. You can also use the 'Wizard' of Overpass turbo, and enter ""surveillance:type"=ALPR around Miami" (or any other city (e.g. your home town), with quotation marks around surveillance:type) and increase the `radius` in the query until you'll find some. As an example, here are the ALPRs 25km around Miami: https://overpass-turbo.eu/s/2dVP

The search directly on osm.org is optimzied for address things.

For a "complete" search in the OpenStreetMap-data I suggest [Overpass Turbo](https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Overpass_turbo).

In this specific case I'd take a little detour over taginfo (https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Taginfo), e.g. search for `surveillance` (https://taginfo.openstreetmap.org/search?q=surveillance) there. A little bit of clicking (Type > Values > ALPR) leads to https://taginfo.openstreetmap.org/tags/surveillance%3Atype=A... If you click on 'Overpass turbo' on the top right, you get to a pre-filled search on Overpass turbo. Scroll the map to the region you want to search (start small), and click 'Run' on the top left.

Voila.

OpenStreetMap doesn't even seem interested in things like "this street is closed next week Tuesday"

OpenStreetMap data consumers can have much longer update cycles than "next week", so it makes sense to have such information outside of the map data if you are implementing a router.

As an avid mapper (and liking to go on dinner-dates with my wife) I absolutely love this. Very slick and quick search, congratulations! Do you also parse the `opening_hours` tag to filter for currently open restaurants?

low energy, high resolution portable X-ray systems in all sorts of trades for NDT weld inspections

low energy home medical X-ray systems

The low energy you desire might not be high enough to penetrate the object you want to image, either a weld to inspect, the blacksmiths bespoke object or the human. For imaging human tissue you want high energy for less radiation dose in the patient. That’s why x-rays are filtered by some mm of aluminum before imaging a patient. These filtered lower energy photons would be absorbed in the patient anyways.

I aim to launch my own GPS satellite to bypass Google’s predatory API calls.

That might be a bit more costly than calling any API :) And launching own GPS satellites has no connection with Google's API as far as I know.

Are you interested in location data only? Then you can actually query https://nominatim.org/, which does the (reverese) geocoding.

the map will be text-only to ensure accessibility.

I wonder how that's done, something like https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Mapscii ?

Theoretically yes. But no person ever is going to look at all the tiles (on the highest zoom levels) in the sea, so they are not rendered by default, and only on demand.

I’ve been preoccupied with some other data that neither Open Maps nor Google provides.

As an avid OpenStreetMapper I honestly wonder what kind of data is missing in OpenStreetMap. Is that something sighted persons cannot grasp and thus not add to OSM? Have you seen https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/OSM_for_the_blind ? Is something missing there?

I also have to think about whether to go open or closed source before using their data.

No, you don’t. If you use the map data, you have to attribute it, but your code doesn’t need to be open. See https://osmfoundation.org/wiki/Licence/Attribution_Guideline... for the guidelines on attribution.