I've not worked in the industry per se but I'm quite passionate about maps and online maps generally speaking, and I'm curious to find out if the good old way of identifying stuff on maps directly through human interaction (so, not using any ML-stuff) shouldn't be given a second (or a third) thought. Of course, all backed by better tools for said humans, so that they can annotate/label/identify the data better.
I've realised that that might still be a viable option once I started to map the forrest cover in my geographic area based on 150-years-old maps (these excellent maps [1] drawn by the Austrians in the 1860s). Some JS-code for the front-end that helped me "draw out" the forests, then send that data to a Django/Python backend and call it a day. It took me a while to draw those forests out but the job was very easily scalable in terms of human-power, i.e. 10 more me would have probably finished it 10 times faster with a little coordination (for anyone curious the data is in here [2], I'd say it was almost 90% done when I passed on to my next project, as I often do). I was first looking at using some heuristics in order to "automate" some part of the job, but both the false-positives and the false-negatives were just too high, the outputs would have been horrible in terms of accuracy.
I've realised that that might still be a viable option once I started to map the forrest cover in my geographic area based on 150-years-old maps (these excellent maps [1] drawn by the Austrians in the 1860s). Some JS-code for the front-end that helped me "draw out" the forests, then send that data to a Django/Python backend and call it a day. It took me a while to draw those forests out but the job was very easily scalable in terms of human-power, i.e. 10 more me would have probably finished it 10 times faster with a little coordination (for anyone curious the data is in here [2], I'd say it was almost 90% done when I passed on to my next project, as I often do). I was first looking at using some heuristics in order to "automate" some part of the job, but both the false-positives and the false-negatives were just too high, the outputs would have been horrible in terms of accuracy.
[1] https://maps.arcanum.com/en/map/secondsurvey-wallachia/?laye...
[2] https://github.com/mihaitc/forrests/tree/master/counties