Quote: iNaturalist makes a subset of its machine learning models publicly available while keeping full species classification models private due to intellectual property considerations and organizational policy.
Shame! IMHO open data input should yield open data output. The community contribute far too much time, data, expertise and money to tolerate this kind of BS, which opens questions about fundamental compatibility with science.
iNaturalist should remove non-open data and commit to fully open output within a fixed period of time to maintain community support.
PlantNet (PL@ntNet) is the same way - a large amount of data is published under permissive licenses but the main models are all proprietary, with only occasional one-off research projects made public. It's operated by a consortium of French government agencies and non-profits (to the extent that these things are equivalent in France).
I wouldn't mind these groups keeping their models private except that their success sucks all the air out of the room when it comes to developing fully open models. The vast majority of users are satisfied with the app or API and so if you aren't you're going to be going it alone. (Of course a for-profit company could have the same effect, but it feels extra bad when it's a non-profit/government agency doing it.)
When did they update their model? It used to often fail to identify things, and now it makes wildly wrong guesses all the time. I wish it would just show the top possibilities. I know it’s not a rust rump tarantula so show me the other options nearby.
Here in Australia, I know a plant is an invasive species when inaturalist/Seek can identify it :) It's not good with native Australian plants so I'd love to build a local solution. Shame it's closed.
I looked into this a bit earlier this year. I'm mixed on it. While the FOSS in me wants it all open-source and available to use given that I'm basically labeling training data for them for free, and they are funded by donations/grants, I get value out of it for free.
My desire was to combine something like iNaturalist with BirdWeather for a bird tracker of audio and visual. BirdWeather does make it free which is great, but there's no great free API of iNaturalist quality for diverse bird tracking.
That being said, I am certain that if iNaturaist made their model public, tons of competitive apps would spring up and it'd be commercialized regardless of license immediately and would take people away from iNaturalist without giving iNaturalist anything in return.
Plus I know iNaturalist has issues with that they don't want autolabeled data uploaded as matched. They only want manually labeled data, which opening the API I'm sure would flood their server with ML labeled data. Which on the one hand, could be useful, but also a ton of noise.
I'm in favor of whatever option is most in line with keeping a long term success of a free, high quality plant/animal identifying app out there, and I don't know enough to take a definitive stance on that, and unfortunately those that do, probably have a vested interest in one of the outcomes.
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[ 2.0 ms ] story [ 28.1 ms ] threadShame! IMHO open data input should yield open data output. The community contribute far too much time, data, expertise and money to tolerate this kind of BS, which opens questions about fundamental compatibility with science.
iNaturalist should remove non-open data and commit to fully open output within a fixed period of time to maintain community support.
I wouldn't mind these groups keeping their models private except that their success sucks all the air out of the room when it comes to developing fully open models. The vast majority of users are satisfied with the app or API and so if you aren't you're going to be going it alone. (Of course a for-profit company could have the same effect, but it feels extra bad when it's a non-profit/government agency doing it.)
My desire was to combine something like iNaturalist with BirdWeather for a bird tracker of audio and visual. BirdWeather does make it free which is great, but there's no great free API of iNaturalist quality for diverse bird tracking.
That being said, I am certain that if iNaturaist made their model public, tons of competitive apps would spring up and it'd be commercialized regardless of license immediately and would take people away from iNaturalist without giving iNaturalist anything in return.
Plus I know iNaturalist has issues with that they don't want autolabeled data uploaded as matched. They only want manually labeled data, which opening the API I'm sure would flood their server with ML labeled data. Which on the one hand, could be useful, but also a ton of noise.
I'm in favor of whatever option is most in line with keeping a long term success of a free, high quality plant/animal identifying app out there, and I don't know enough to take a definitive stance on that, and unfortunately those that do, probably have a vested interest in one of the outcomes.