Big tech companies come together to develop interoperable open map data

To strengthen mapping services around the world, the global non-profit technology consortium Linux Foundation launched the Overture Maps Foundation on December 15. This initiative aims to create reliable, easy-to-use, and interoperable open map data for current and next-generation map products. This initiative is founded jointly by Meta, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft along with mapping and location tech company TomTom.

The first datasets will be released in the first half of 2023. The initial release will have basic layers with buildings, roads, and other administrative information. Going forth, Overture plans to improve coverage and accuracy of existing data, and introduce new layers like 3D building data.

“Through Overture, we are facilitating greater cooperation across the industry to make comprehensive, high-quality map data available to more end users. This will allow everyone to take advantage of the same underlying data to power a wide range of established and emerging mapping use cases across industries,” said Michael Kopenec, general manager for AWS Geospatial.

Currently, map data is used in many applications for local search, routing and navigation, logistics, autonomous driving, and data visualisation. In the coming future, this data would also be used for augmented reality applications for social, gaming, and education purposes.

Some of the challenges developers delivering map services include sourcing and curating high quality data from different sources. It is possible that multiple datasets use the same real-world entities with their own conventions and vocabulary making them difficult to combine. It also makes map data vulnerable to errors and inconsistencies. The Overture Maps Foundation is expected to address these challenges and complement existing open data. For this project, the Linux Foundation has detailed four main agendas – collaborative map building; simplifying interoperability by linking entities from different data sets; enforcing quality assurance processes to ensure these data points can be used in production systems; define and drive common and structured data schema to create an ecosystem of map data.

In the blog announcing the launch of the initiative, the Linux Foundation said that the project will seek to integrate existing open map data from projects like OpenStreetMap, city planning departments, and those built using computer vision and artificial intelligence/machine learning techniques.

 “Overture’s open and interoperable base map is fundamental to bringing the world together to create the smartest map on the planet. TomTom’s Maps Platform will leverage the combination of the Overture base map and our own data to serve even the most demanding commercial use cases for our automotive and enterprise customers,” said Mike Harrell, vice president of engineering for TomTom’s new Maps Platform.

Adding to that Jan Erik Solem, engineering director, Maps at Meta said that Overture will provide a foundation for an open source metaverse built by creators, developers, and businesses.