Linux Foundation Overture Maps the Globe with Open Data

SEATTLE — A Linux Foundation project to map the world with open data has launched a beta of its service this week, bringing enterprises and startups an open source alternative to commercial services such as Google Maps.

The project announced the new availability at the Linux Open Source Summit North America, being held this week in Seattle.

“Mapping has become this incredibly hard thing to do well. There’s so much data you have to do worldwide coverage,” said Marc Prioleau, executive director of LF’s Overture Maps Foundation, in an interview with TNS. Unless you have a Google-proportioned budget, it’s hard to for a single entity to do a thorough job, at least not at a global scale.

The Overture Maps Foundation has opened its data and schema, which can be used in a wide range of commercial mapping applications and geospatial analysis.

Steering committee members include Amazon, Microsoft, Meta and TomTom.

A production-ready dataset should be ready later in the year, though at least one of the collective’s members is already using the data.

Geographic information system provider Esri is using the dataset to furnish new 2D and 3D map layers for the ArcGIS line of software.

Not Only Surveyors but Sensors

Founded in 2022, the foundation’s strategy is to aggregate multiple map data sources, including the considerable OpenStreetMap wiki world map, into a single dataset.

OpenStreetMap is a great dataset, but other useful data can come from both governments and commercial entities, including satellite/aerial imagery, Prioleau said.

Prioleau also anticipates an increasing amount of data coming from AI. Road changes, for instance, could be picked up through AI, which would interpret sensor data coming from many cars traveling down some heretofore unmarked road.

Overture massages the data with validation and quality checks as well as regular updates.

Data can be added by outside parties through Overture’s Global Entity Reference System or GERS, which attaches unique identifiers to entities in the data.

For potential users, the Overture Maps Data Schema provides a standard way to consume the data.

At present, the Beta release includes five base layers:

• Places of Interest (Over 50 million entities captured thus far)

• Buildings

• Transportation (roads, footpaths and other travel infrastructure)

• Administrative Boundaries (national and regional administrative boundaries)

• Base (contextual layers including land and water data).