A lot of people are misunderstanding the article in this thread.
I work with GIS data from multiple sources. Neither Google's APIs nor OSM nor Bing nor anything else is enough for applications with high specs. You need to mix machine learning and available sources.
Doing this is a PITA. Sources rarely match one another (e.g. an object will be referenced on both Bing and OSM, but 20 meters apart, with no way of accurately matching them in the middle of a dense city).
The article very clearly says that the goals include making the existing services interoperable, which would be a big advance for API customers. (This isn't about making a new Google Maps competitor, it's about a Google Maps _API_ competitor, though it will surely help build the former too.)
Just being able to download the same area from Bing and OSM and seeing "this house has ID 234 here and 234 here, that's the same building" would be great, because that lets you gather all the available information about it instead of having to choose one or use matching algorithms that can make mistakes. It can also remove false positives, which also happen.
I’ve been dealing with this recently and it’s a mojor headache, but the issue of things not lining up is primarily one of using coordinate systems correctly, knowing what things were measure in and what they are shown in
I struggle to see why supporting OpenStreetMap wouldnt be a better course of action. OSM already has lots of good data; is the only valueadd redefining the format to be more enterprisey andor gatekeep some data? Hard to tell from their press release or really even the article.
If Overture Maps wants something that OSM doesn't want to provide, I'm quite happy that they don't try to force OSM in a different direction.
For example, OSM has data but doesn't really want to be serving map tiles to the entire world. There are companies that are quite happy to serve map tiles, but I assume that's not all they're looking for either.
The Global Entity Reference System looks quite interesting: if it's going to work well, it's going to have to bear at least a passing resemblance to Unicode in that it will need to capture all the different ways that existing systems refer to distinct entities. I can understand why OSM wouldn't want to build such a system, but I hope it would also be quite valuable to the OSM community.
OSM isn't the be-all and end-all of GIS data. It's very incomplete in places and doesn't always spatially match with Bing's data or other sources.
> is the only valueadd redefining the format to be more enterprisey andor gatekeep some data
I'd like to interpret that in the "strongest possible" way as HN's guidelines request, but I can't find one. This is the opposite of what the article says.
> 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.
"Overture is intended to be complementary to OSM. We combine OSM with other sources to produce new open map data sets."
https://overturemaps.org/resources/faq/
It's quite hard to contribute teledetected data in bulk to OSM. For instance we tried to contribute Africa forests back in 2016 and just gave up. Later I wanted to contribute my city's borders from an official source. We had a GEOJSON and ultimately had to draw it over that with the help of another contributor and fix all the data manually.
This doesn't look bad even though I don't trust Amazon, MS and Meta.
Does anyone find it troubling that the Linux foundation is being hijacked for tertiary interests that do not involve things in the operating systems/virtualization/containerization area but are simply concerns that some members of the Linux foundation have?
Linux Foundation employee here [0]. The value the Linux Foundation is providing the legal infrastructure for competitors to work together and stay clear of anti-trust problems. Every one of our meetings is supposed to start with this slide [1] or similar [2].
FYI you have a outdated view of the Linux Foundation, it truly hosts a variety of open source foundations involving open source + data these days... it can be more viewed as a professional "foundation as a service" organization: https://www.linuxfoundation.org/resources/publications/linux...
Aside from hosting projects under the Linux Foundation directly, LF (and OASIS, for example) also offer Foundation-as-a-Service for anybody who is ready to pay for a setup with a good (whatever that means to you) governance model. This is exactly what's happening here and I see no problem with that (unless your argument is that LF should not do Foundation-aaS at all).
I saw Linux, Amazon, Meta and Microsoft, and I thought: one of these is not like the others. It's almost the opposite. What mutual interest can they possibly have?
Not really, besides maybe the name being a bit confusing. As far as I can see they're still doing great work supporting open software/knowledge projects.
You've already expanded the Linux Foundation to tertiary interests but don't see mapping as one of them? The very same foundation that created the NodeJS foundation?
Odd view on things frankly. This is the one thing the foundation does very well.
Linux foundation is already a corporate directed foundation.
They don't push or even care about Desktop linux for a reason, they are also extremely anti GPL, which funny because one of the biggest reasons for linux's success is the GPL, just look at BSD/freebsd and Apple, and compare that to Red hat and Linux.
I welcome this. Google simply has too much control over this area.
Case: I work for a small, family owned business. It does home remodeling. A large part of how the company generates leads is through the website and Google Business profile (or Google Maps listing).
The business currently ranks well, but there is a growing threat from marketing firms.
This is not a problem with competitors hiring marketing firms. It's marketing firms or solo marketing "gurus" who setup websites for each city in the metro area and a matching Google Business profile. These profiles are often setup through reaching out to local residents who'll accept Google's postcard verification for a new listing at their home address. In return for providing the marketer with the code, the resident gets a small fee.
Once the website and listing start ranking, the marketer tries to get local contractors to buy the leads from them.
This scheme is known as "rank and rent" in some circles (read: among shady marketers).
These actors add no value. It's for this reason that Google explicitly forbids this activity in its Google Business profile listings.
However, go about reporting such profiles, nothing happens.
I welcome a break of the monopoly so that Google and others will start taking more action on shady marketing tactics.
Or Google could hire humans to do tech support and address these kind of problems directly. But we know that Google's profitability is in part because they have dispensed with the idea that you can phone someone to report a problem and get a fix. But there could be a simpler human solution to this problem rather than a legal or technical one.
I worked at Microsoft 10 years ago and at the time Bing was still being pushed hard along with the new Windows phone.
The lack of geospatial was a major painpoint for both products but confusingly it's one they decided to not invest in.
I heard directly from the VP in charge of it why: open source maps were going to make Google maps irrelevant. We saw it with encarta and wikipedia he told me. Once the open source community gets its hands on something it becomes impossible to compete with.
A decade later Google maps still has no real competition.
Seems like that vp misunderstood the complexities to build and maintain the product and the utility people expect. Wikipedia is text of historical events. All it take is someone sitting at your computer to maintain it.
Commuting has many components beyond get me from a to b. Those also have to be maintained, and actually require that people sometimes physically visit a place to confirm it still even exists. Not to mention all the photographic information necessary to support the product.
Yeah but will they charter planes with cameras and build software to process all that imagery? Drive cars around to take street level pictures, detect and blur faces? Somehow get indoor and underground mall maps? Pay armies of data cleanup ops people to make manual adjustments? Process phone location data to infer traffic conditions?
I think it's a very commendable effort but I'm not sure it can be accomplished with a collaborative potluck approach vs a very strategic investment with clear accountability.
The partner structure makes sense, I guess this will be the result:
- TomTom provides their mapping data (they already have fleets of cars, planes, people and relations to city planners, as well as live data for traffic conditions. They get some sort of monetization back as the market for navigation devices has all but collapsed over the last decade.
- AWS and Microsoft provide cloud services
- Microsoft and Meta bring reach to the new platform - MS has O365 Outlook and Meta with all their services that use maps integration
- Meta brings in a huge list of POI data and attendance information because almost all businesses still have (validated) Facebook pages with coordinates, and the Facebook app is notorious for being a data vacuum
- Linux Foundation coordinates dealing with FOSS projects, particularly OSM and desktop environments - the other companies aren't really the best in thinking in the same way as for-profit corporation
In the end, everyone brings in something valuable to the service, and gets something in return.
I recently saw a post on an android site about alternatives to google maps and since I'm going to be driving over the holidays I have tried out a couple. They may or may not give better directions but the voice nav on both of the ones I tried was terribly robotic compared to google maps' voice.
One of them even had the default that it made an alert every time you were above the speed limit. So in town when I would be varying between just above and just below the speed limit depending on the flow of traffic, the stupid app would be beeping constantly. For the first time ever I was hoping for a red light so I could have a moment to find the setting to turn that off.
I’m all for more map competition with Google, but I’m wary of what it means for correcting rural/suburban addresses.
I have a friend whose address didn’t properly exist in OSM, which resulted in packages regularly being undeliverable from Amazon and the like. I helped submit a change that mostly fixed the delivery issue. However, it’s been years and the change has never propagated to Bing, and my direct change requests to MS have been ignored.
As another example, someone/someapp decided that the road I live on should be Mystreet Dr. instead of just Mystreet. Now I run into all kinds of ‘this address looks incorrect!’ validation errors when I use the correct name. Even worse, the municipal legislation to change my street name missed some procedural steps. So, some maps, including my car’s nag, have it as Oldstreetname. This may be technically correct, but no one calls it or knows it to be Oldstreetname and Oldstreetname is definitely not on any road signs. I also have no idea what data source my car’s nav is using, so U don’t know how to correct it.
> I helped submit a change that mostly fixed the delivery issue. However, it’s been years and the change has never propagated to Bing
Note that Bing has their own database and doesn't just repackage OSM.
Keeping accurate and up-to-date addresses for the whole world is impossible to do manually. I think initiatives like the one described here can make it easier to correlate multiple sources and fix this kind of errors.
Exhausted with people abusing and misusing the word monopoly. A monopoly and having market dominance are not the same thing. Google has put far more effort into Google Maps than Microsoft ever has into Bing Maps.
I hate to break it to everyone, but "dominance" does not equal "profits." How do I know this?
I was in Google Patent Litigation, and there were tons of suits against Maps. In all of these, the plaintiff strains as hard as they can to find some connection to Ads, because that's where the money is. Maps doesn't bring in much money.
I'm not going to quote figures here. In some countries, they were paying someone per search for data, because they didn't have their own map data yet. Maybe that's changed.
"Oh, but imputed revenue!" you say? Well, no one has ever succeeded in defining that and proving it. You can be certain that Google won't ever do it, even internally, because that would end up in Discovery.
I didn't read anything indicating they will contribute back to OSM only that they will siphon off all the work and data done by OSM contributors to date; ultimately aiding Microsoft with another EEE demolition.
Google's Maps API isn't an open standard, this isn't extending the Maps API, Gates doesn't run Microsoft, people don't owe you free contributions of their work.
Title is a bit misleading. This is about the API, which is used by various third parties like ride-sharing apps, and which are probably annoyed at how expensive Google made the Maps API.
One thing map Google Maps seems to lack is moving street labels. When I zoom in and out, I still want to see the names of the streets. They're not physical maps, why not always show me the name of the street? It doesn't need to be a series of static images at different zoom levels, they could just move the name of the street around, but they don't. Sometimes I zoom in on Google Maps and a street name will disappear despite the entire street being visible and it showing the name before. It's beyond frustrating. Strangely enough, randomly highlighted businesses and their dollar sign prices estimates never seem to disappear...
However, there are two things that keep me on Google Maps that others don't seem to have:
1. Public transit directions - I live without a car, I want to be able to get directions that use the subway, and I've never seen anything comparable to what Google Maps does here in combining walking+subway (or occasionally the bus if there's no other choice) directions. Google Maps also highlights everything in the correct colors (Red for Red Line, green for Green Line, blue for Blue Line, orange for Orange Line, purple for commuter rail (painted purple IRL) and yellow for buses (painted yellow IRL)), which matches my mental model for how I get around in the city.
2. Web based API - One of my main uses for Google Maps is checking directions on my PC before I leave my home. Despite Google's best attempts to hide it (and all browsers' best attempts to hide their bookmark shortcut feature for some reason), you can bookmark shortcuts with URL queries to skip the increasingly sluggish Google Maps UI and get results directly. I use the following:
The lack of street labels drives me crazy sometimes! I used to love GMaps a decade ago. It was snappy and still did most of what it does today, but quicker. Now it's just frustrating with all the cards automatically sliding around. Thanks for the bookmarking tips!
A vaguely relevant anecdote: in my year before joining Google, I was a Patent Agent, and I got assigned to help Chinedu Echeruo of HopStop [1] with his patent. He was in NYC and I never actually met him; we just talked on the phone.
"Nigeria" is almost a joke in tech circles, with all the Princes who need your help to get their fortunes out, but Chinedu is Nigerian.
At the time, his was the only service that had NYC transit schedules online, and he did it largely by paper-scraping! They would take the paper bus & subway schedules, and OCR or hand-code the data. Nowadays, almost every city has their transit schedules online. HopStop was bought by Apple eventually.
Ah yes, Linux, Amazon, Meta, and a company that's been running a map service for seventeen years in a failing attempt at direct competition with Google maps. This is just the Bing show with new guests, isn't it?
This group are cooperating to define common data structures and references - for data under their respective purviews - to supercede the status quo, where each company uses their own proprietary structures (a status quo which results in tedious work - for mapping projects the world over - when data from different sources is combined in a project).
That is the "GERS" and "Schema" aspects of the project.
It's very much back-end stuff, but the vision is that the resulting data collaboration will improve the job of working with map data from different sources.
Leading to the other key project points, "QA" - whereby data from different sources can be more easily compared and corrected, once it's all sharing common structures and IDs; and ultimately the last key project point "Collaborative Map Building", which all the previous steps have worked to enable.
Commercial service/product might be an end point for the Overture project as a whole, leveraging all the aforementioned work to result in (they hope) a kind of "mapping data consortium", but frankly what most of us care about is the way data (and it's interoperation) in general may be improved by this keystone effort. Such that, a few years down the track, we back-end map workers can source data from different places and have it all line up - I don't mean spatially, but in data structure and identity.
They're saying this like Google doesn't deserve all it's earned here.
Creating maps, endlessly tweaking UX, creating street view, integration with Waze, much faster updates around road construction than any other service, search for companies inside the map based on abstracted terms, 3D-views... any "monopoly" is well earned.
Google isn't forcing users to use their maps, Google just has hands down the best maps and features.
I'm a die-hard DDG user, but I still use g! when I want to see maps or look up directions.
That said, serious competition would also be good for Google. The maps org is still huge but a lot of what they are doing is tiny iterative improvements these days, not enough swinging for the fences to really add new and exciting products/APIs. If nothing else comes of this, hopefully it spooks some Geo org planners into thinking bigger.
It's a nice start but what we also need would be an "OpenRasterMap" project - a project where we collect raster data (more and more data gets available) and store the entire planet (RGBN aerial imagery) in let's say 1m/Pixel.
It might be feasible to store entire planet's raster tiles in 10 years in a (beefy) desktop machine.
[+] [-] plonk|3 years ago|reply
I work with GIS data from multiple sources. Neither Google's APIs nor OSM nor Bing nor anything else is enough for applications with high specs. You need to mix machine learning and available sources.
Doing this is a PITA. Sources rarely match one another (e.g. an object will be referenced on both Bing and OSM, but 20 meters apart, with no way of accurately matching them in the middle of a dense city).
The article very clearly says that the goals include making the existing services interoperable, which would be a big advance for API customers. (This isn't about making a new Google Maps competitor, it's about a Google Maps _API_ competitor, though it will surely help build the former too.)
Just being able to download the same area from Bing and OSM and seeing "this house has ID 234 here and 234 here, that's the same building" would be great, because that lets you gather all the available information about it instead of having to choose one or use matching algorithms that can make mistakes. It can also remove false positives, which also happen.
[+] [-] secretsatan|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sweettea|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] andrewaylett|3 years ago|reply
For example, OSM has data but doesn't really want to be serving map tiles to the entire world. There are companies that are quite happy to serve map tiles, but I assume that's not all they're looking for either.
The Global Entity Reference System looks quite interesting: if it's going to work well, it's going to have to bear at least a passing resemblance to Unicode in that it will need to capture all the different ways that existing systems refer to distinct entities. I can understand why OSM wouldn't want to build such a system, but I hope it would also be quite valuable to the OSM community.
[+] [-] plonk|3 years ago|reply
> is the only valueadd redefining the format to be more enterprisey andor gatekeep some data
I'd like to interpret that in the "strongest possible" way as HN's guidelines request, but I can't find one. This is the opposite of what the article says.
> 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.
[+] [-] danuker|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] timeon|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] petre|3 years ago|reply
This doesn't look bad even though I don't trust Amazon, MS and Meta.
[+] [-] supriyo-biswas|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] RyJones|3 years ago|reply
0: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ryjones/
1: https://wiki.hyperledger.org/download/attachments/20024102/H...
2: https://www.linuxfoundation.org/legal/antitrust-policy
[+] [-] caniszczyk|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] smarx007|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sgc|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tgv|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] solarkraft|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mook|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fh973|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] glogla|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] doh|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nojito|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] waboremo|3 years ago|reply
Odd view on things frankly. This is the one thing the foundation does very well.
[+] [-] jacooper|3 years ago|reply
They don't push or even care about Desktop linux for a reason, they are also extremely anti GPL, which funny because one of the biggest reasons for linux's success is the GPL, just look at BSD/freebsd and Apple, and compare that to Red hat and Linux.
[+] [-] HarleyBestfield|3 years ago|reply
Case: I work for a small, family owned business. It does home remodeling. A large part of how the company generates leads is through the website and Google Business profile (or Google Maps listing).
The business currently ranks well, but there is a growing threat from marketing firms.
This is not a problem with competitors hiring marketing firms. It's marketing firms or solo marketing "gurus" who setup websites for each city in the metro area and a matching Google Business profile. These profiles are often setup through reaching out to local residents who'll accept Google's postcard verification for a new listing at their home address. In return for providing the marketer with the code, the resident gets a small fee.
Once the website and listing start ranking, the marketer tries to get local contractors to buy the leads from them.
This scheme is known as "rank and rent" in some circles (read: among shady marketers).
These actors add no value. It's for this reason that Google explicitly forbids this activity in its Google Business profile listings.
However, go about reporting such profiles, nothing happens.
I welcome a break of the monopoly so that Google and others will start taking more action on shady marketing tactics.
[+] [-] kilolima|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] CSMastermind|3 years ago|reply
The lack of geospatial was a major painpoint for both products but confusingly it's one they decided to not invest in.
I heard directly from the VP in charge of it why: open source maps were going to make Google maps irrelevant. We saw it with encarta and wikipedia he told me. Once the open source community gets its hands on something it becomes impossible to compete with.
A decade later Google maps still has no real competition.
[+] [-] bendergarcia|3 years ago|reply
Commuting has many components beyond get me from a to b. Those also have to be maintained, and actually require that people sometimes physically visit a place to confirm it still even exists. Not to mention all the photographic information necessary to support the product.
[+] [-] yafbum|3 years ago|reply
I think it's a very commendable effort but I'm not sure it can be accomplished with a collaborative potluck approach vs a very strategic investment with clear accountability.
[+] [-] mschuster91|3 years ago|reply
- TomTom provides their mapping data (they already have fleets of cars, planes, people and relations to city planners, as well as live data for traffic conditions. They get some sort of monetization back as the market for navigation devices has all but collapsed over the last decade.
- AWS and Microsoft provide cloud services
- Microsoft and Meta bring reach to the new platform - MS has O365 Outlook and Meta with all their services that use maps integration
- Meta brings in a huge list of POI data and attendance information because almost all businesses still have (validated) Facebook pages with coordinates, and the Facebook app is notorious for being a data vacuum
- Linux Foundation coordinates dealing with FOSS projects, particularly OSM and desktop environments - the other companies aren't really the best in thinking in the same way as for-profit corporation
In the end, everyone brings in something valuable to the service, and gets something in return.
[+] [-] jccalhoun|3 years ago|reply
One of them even had the default that it made an alert every time you were above the speed limit. So in town when I would be varying between just above and just below the speed limit depending on the flow of traffic, the stupid app would be beeping constantly. For the first time ever I was hoping for a red light so I could have a moment to find the setting to turn that off.
[+] [-] SV_BubbleTime|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] antiterra|3 years ago|reply
I have a friend whose address didn’t properly exist in OSM, which resulted in packages regularly being undeliverable from Amazon and the like. I helped submit a change that mostly fixed the delivery issue. However, it’s been years and the change has never propagated to Bing, and my direct change requests to MS have been ignored.
As another example, someone/someapp decided that the road I live on should be Mystreet Dr. instead of just Mystreet. Now I run into all kinds of ‘this address looks incorrect!’ validation errors when I use the correct name. Even worse, the municipal legislation to change my street name missed some procedural steps. So, some maps, including my car’s nag, have it as Oldstreetname. This may be technically correct, but no one calls it or knows it to be Oldstreetname and Oldstreetname is definitely not on any road signs. I also have no idea what data source my car’s nav is using, so U don’t know how to correct it.
[+] [-] plonk|3 years ago|reply
Note that Bing has their own database and doesn't just repackage OSM.
Keeping accurate and up-to-date addresses for the whole world is impossible to do manually. I think initiatives like the one described here can make it easier to correlate multiple sources and fix this kind of errors.
[+] [-] PaulsWallet|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] AlbertCory|3 years ago|reply
I was in Google Patent Litigation, and there were tons of suits against Maps. In all of these, the plaintiff strains as hard as they can to find some connection to Ads, because that's where the money is. Maps doesn't bring in much money.
I'm not going to quote figures here. In some countries, they were paying someone per search for data, because they didn't have their own map data yet. Maybe that's changed.
"Oh, but imputed revenue!" you say? Well, no one has ever succeeded in defining that and proving it. You can be certain that Google won't ever do it, even internally, because that would end up in Discovery.
[+] [-] wankle|3 years ago|reply
Ref: https://overturemaps.org/resources/faq/
"Overture data will be available for use by the OpenStreetMap community under compatible open data licenses."
Being available isn't contributing back, Gates.
EEE Ref: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis...
[+] [-] jodrellblank|3 years ago|reply
"OpenStreetMap is open data: you are free to use it for any purpose" - https://www.openstreetmap.org/about
[+] [-] gniv|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] docandrew|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] MiddleEndian|3 years ago|reply
However, there are two things that keep me on Google Maps that others don't seem to have:
1. Public transit directions - I live without a car, I want to be able to get directions that use the subway, and I've never seen anything comparable to what Google Maps does here in combining walking+subway (or occasionally the bus if there's no other choice) directions. Google Maps also highlights everything in the correct colors (Red for Red Line, green for Green Line, blue for Blue Line, orange for Orange Line, purple for commuter rail (painted purple IRL) and yellow for buses (painted yellow IRL)), which matches my mental model for how I get around in the city.
2. Web based API - One of my main uses for Google Maps is checking directions on my PC before I leave my home. Despite Google's best attempts to hide it (and all browsers' best attempts to hide their bookmark shortcut feature for some reason), you can bookmark shortcuts with URL queries to skip the increasingly sluggish Google Maps UI and get results directly. I use the following:
(regular Google Maps query, shortcut `gm`) https://www.google.com/maps/search/%s
(directions from my house, shortcut `dir`) https://www.google.com/maps/dir/my+street+address,+boston,+m...
(transit directions from my house, shortcut `tdir`) https://www.google.com/maps?saddr=my+street+address,+boston,...
(walking directions from my house, shortcut `wdir`) https://www.google.com/maps?saddr=my+street+address,+boston,...
[+] [-] aceazzameen|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] AlbertCory|3 years ago|reply
"Nigeria" is almost a joke in tech circles, with all the Princes who need your help to get their fortunes out, but Chinedu is Nigerian.
At the time, his was the only service that had NYC transit schedules online, and he did it largely by paper-scraping! They would take the paper bus & subway schedules, and OCR or hand-code the data. Nowadays, almost every city has their transit schedules online. HopStop was bought by Apple eventually.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HopStop
[+] [-] TheRealPomax|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] crtified|3 years ago|reply
That is the "GERS" and "Schema" aspects of the project.
It's very much back-end stuff, but the vision is that the resulting data collaboration will improve the job of working with map data from different sources.
Leading to the other key project points, "QA" - whereby data from different sources can be more easily compared and corrected, once it's all sharing common structures and IDs; and ultimately the last key project point "Collaborative Map Building", which all the previous steps have worked to enable.
Commercial service/product might be an end point for the Overture project as a whole, leveraging all the aforementioned work to result in (they hope) a kind of "mapping data consortium", but frankly what most of us care about is the way data (and it's interoperation) in general may be improved by this keystone effort. Such that, a few years down the track, we back-end map workers can source data from different places and have it all line up - I don't mean spatially, but in data structure and identity.
[+] [-] sidewndr46|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dbg31415|3 years ago|reply
Creating maps, endlessly tweaking UX, creating street view, integration with Waze, much faster updates around road construction than any other service, search for companies inside the map based on abstracted terms, 3D-views... any "monopoly" is well earned.
Google isn't forcing users to use their maps, Google just has hands down the best maps and features.
I'm a die-hard DDG user, but I still use g! when I want to see maps or look up directions.
[+] [-] AStellersSeaCow|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zetalemur|3 years ago|reply
It might be feasible to store entire planet's raster tiles in 10 years in a (beefy) desktop machine.