Imagine a world where maps are no longer a monopoly of a few tech giants. This is the world that the Overture Maps Foundation (OMF) is trying to build. Born from a collaboration between Amazon Website Services (AWS), Meta, Microsoft e TomTom, OMF announced the release of its first open map dataset. Let's see why it's an important step where Google Maps now has a monopoly.
Overture Maps Foundation: A new horizon for open source maps
The dataset, named Overture 2023-07-26-alpha.0, includes four unique data layers: Points of Interest (THEN), Building, Network of transport e Confini administrative. These layers, which combine various open map data sources, were validated and merged through a series of quality checks. The places dataset includes data about over 59 million locations worldwide and will be a building block for navigation, local search, and many other location-based applications.
The collaboration is based on the premise that map data must be a shared good to support future applications. As the demands for accuracy, currency, and attribution in maps have increased to meet user needs, the costs and complexities of collecting and maintaining global map data have grown beyond the capacity of any single organization.
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Overture's release 2023-07-26-alpha.0 represents a significant step in establishing a comprehensive open map dataset and of commercial quality for our ever changing world. The places dataset, in particular, represents an important set of previously unavailable open data, with the potential to map everything from new businesses large and small to street markets located anywhere in the world.
As mentioned earlier, there are four layers of unique data. The Points of Interest layer includes over 59 million POI records that have not previously been released as data collected open. This dataset, itself derived from data contributed to OMF by founding members Meta and Microsoft, provides a significant data base of places around the world. The Overture community it will combine the best data from all available resources, including open government data, crowdsourced local mapping data, AI/ML techniques, and more to enhance, update, and extend your data on an ongoing basis.
Future versions will integrate new open data sources, further transformations of these data layers into the OMF data schema, and the implementation of the Global Entity Reference System (here more information), a stable ID system that allows data to be added consistently to features on the map.”
Through | The Verge
