Overture Maps Foundation

[PeterCorless]

I looked at this page, and I left mostly confused as to what, precisely, "Overture Maps" actually is (or will be). Is it...

a) A geospatial data revision control system? [Collaborative Map Building]

b) A new way to do geospatial indexing, or some metamanagement layer on top of one or more existing forms of geospatial indexing? [Global Entity Reference System]

c) A quality control process, tool, system or review board/certification standard? [Quality Assurance Processes]

d) Specific SQL or NoSQL reifications for binding to specific datastores? [Structured Data Schema]

You can read into these tea leaves all you want, but at the end of the day, it's all just marketecture with no actual "stuff" behind it. At least as far as you and I as rubes on the Internet are concerned. The page is very, very light on details.

Moreover, I am 100% positive that the $3,000 price tag for individuals to just poke your nose in the tent, or $300,000 to actually to have voting rights is about as anti-open source-y as you can get.

Is it just me? Is this how people expect good open source results and progress to actually occur?

[artonge]

From the FAQ:

What is the relationship between Overture and OpenStreetMap?

Overture is a data-centric map project, not a community of individual map editors. Therefore, Overture is intended to be complementary to OSM. We combine OSM with other sources to produce new open map data sets. Overture data will be available for use by the OpenStreetMap community under compatible open data licenses. Overture members are encouraged to contribute to OSM directly.

[artonge]

Also:

How will Overture data be licensed?

Data contributed to ODbL licensed datasets will be contributed under both the ODbL and CDLA permissive v2. Contributions to CDLA permissive v2 datasets will be contributed under the CDLA permissive v2. How will Overture code be licensed?

Overture’s open source code will be subject to the MIT license.

ODbL: https://opendatacommons.org/licenses/odbl/

[SlimyHog]

Thank you. This is exactly what I was wondering

[IIAOPSW]

There's already a ton of open source tools and map community resources. Why should I trust the consortium set up by Meta et al?

[tony_cannistra]

The background here is mostly that these big organizations feel threatened by Google, and issues like the legal/licensure restrictions behind using big open data projects like OpenStreetMap make it hard to commit to using those datasets. They're trying to stay competitive.

[mistrial9]

it's like DisneyLand, except maybe more like WestWorld

[tony_cannistra]

Previous related discussion: TomTom's new mapping platform and ecosystem. (550 points, 455 comments)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33432720

[solardev]

It's interesting that this is a consortium of second-tier map providers -- all the commercial enterprises that aren't as good as Google or Mapbox on the web. No ESRI participation on the GIS front. No OpenLayers or Leaflet or Maplibre on the open source front.

This reminds me of the Micro Four Thirds model, where smaller camera manufacturers teamed up to fight Canon and Nikon. This looks like a bunch of smaller map companies trying to stay relevant.

(edit: the below is incorrect, please see boise's reply below) FWIW, I believe none of the founding members generate their own mapping data the way that Google, the Census, or Here.com do. They mostly republish Census/USPS data along with relicensing ESRI or Here spatial data. So it's not even a consortium of data creators, but more like an interop group that's trying to create a competing standard to what's already out there.

[boise]

All of the founding members generate their own mapping data, and are top tier contributors to OpenStreetMap https://www.mdpi.com/2220-9964/8/5/232

[7952]

There are a large number of other datasets beyond the big name ones like OSM. There are governments all over the world uploading thousands of layers to thousands of different open data portals. Dozens of satellite operators selling optical and radar data. Commercial vendors selling information about property, mobile phone reception, demographic information. And it's all in different formats uses different vocabularies and was built to different standards.

And it is not just about maps but as an input to other systems and models. Knowing the location of a customer, machine or business tells you a lot about it and this kind of data unlocks that.

Also, ESRI are quietly putting a lot of effort into data curation and aggregating it in one place. But whatever they build will be slow, buggy, and focused on ESRI and its customers. In fact a lot of government open data providers have been moving their portals to ESRI and access to raw flat files is being lost.

[mistrial9]

s/a competing standard/a gated community/

[Doctor_Fegg]

Duplicate of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33998438

[jtmiclat]

Interesting to see some of the founding members of Overture Maps Foundation are also major sponsors of MapLibre (https://maplibre.org/sponsors/). I wonder if there are plans to unify these 2 communities.

[jtmiclat]

Looking into it, it seems all founding members sponsor maplibre https://opencollective.com/maplibre (MS is sponsoring via Github sponsors)

[lostfocus]

I'm honestly a bit baffled - what do they actually do?

[tppiotrowski]

OpenStreetMap collects data via volunteers entering information about their neighborhoods but there is also government generated data from surveys so I think they aim to automate combining the two in a unified open source format.