Last week, more than 50 GIS specialists from Sweden and Denmark gathered for a meetup at the Mapillary headquarters. This was a great chance to exchange experiences about using street-level imagery in GIS work. We’ve been asked to share the keynote by Jan Erik so here it is—bottom line, anyone can get data from their street-level imagery.

We also had a few guest speakers. Ola Setterby from Alingsås explained why the municipality decided to bring their street-level imagery to Mapillary. Alingsås had 24,000 full 360° panoramas collected for a street asset inventory. They were looking for a easy-to-use and low-cost solution that could be integrated with their internal web map.

Mapillary provides them easy access to the imagery via maps together with smooth spatial navigation between the images. As a bonus, the data could be made open on the Mapillary platform, which also meant that there were no imagery hosting fees. They’re now thinking about the process of updating the imagery to use the Mapillary Time Travel function for monitoring changes.

Harmannus Menninga from WSP Sweden talked about using Mapillary in transportation and infrastructure sectors. Harmannus, who by the way happens to be one of Mapillary’s earliest adopters known as harry, was specifically working with asphalt inventories. He was involved in developing an app for inventorying that would also have street-level imagery integrated.

Mapillary imagery provides additional value to WSP’s customers, enabling them to do virtual site visits via a smooth navigation experience in the integrated Mapillary viewer.

Ola Setterby from Alingsås municipality talking about how they used Mapillary

Our third special guest was Tobias Hellberg from Trimtec who was demoing the Trimble MX7 camera—the same one that the City of Amsterdam used for the imagery they imported to Mapillary. Additionally, our own team showed a multitude of other equipment from smartphones to action cameras that can be used for Mapillary.

Next to the interesting presentations we’d also like to highlight a few insights that we picked up from speaking to the attendees. First, field work is always manual and time-intensive, whether it’s for collecting asset data, surveying locations for projects, or performing road maintenance. People were excited to hear about real-world examples of tools that can help automate (or at least speed up!) the work.

Second, Mapillary is useful for people in many job roles, across many platforms. It's important to give our partners and users the resources they need to learn how to build their own solutions, whether its capture guides or developer resources. People have useful and unique ideas, and Mapillary’s role is to help make these projects and applications a reality.

We want to say thanks to everyone who attended, and especially our guest speakers. Hopefully, this event was the first of many and until then, we’re always just an email away if you want to learn more about how Mapillary can help you in GIS work.

/Madelen and the Mapillary team