In order to provide technologies that contribute to mobility in large cities and promote innovation, prestigious companies such as Amazon, Meta, Microsoft and TomTom have partnered to create the Overture Maps Foundation.
This is a collaboration to develop open and interoperable mapping data that would represent direct competition to Google Maps. The intention is to create high-quality, easy-to-use open maps by promoting and adopting a common data schema.
Furthermore, the invention seeks to address the current need for map data in areas such as mobility, navigation, logistics and data visualization.
Overture’s mission is to enable current and next-generation mapping products that are easy to use. The mapping data will be open and extensible by all under an open data license. This alternative could become a rival to map leader Google Maps or Google Maps API services.
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Partnership Focus
The drivers of the Overture project consist of a data-centric set of maps, not a community of individual map publishers. Therefore, the alliance is intended to be complementary to OSM or OpenStreetMap.
They will combine OSM with other sources to produce new open map datasets. Overture data will be available for use by the OpenStreetMap community under compatible open figure licenses.
Amazon Web Services, Meta, Microsoft and TomTom expect to release the first datasets, with basic layers including buildings, roads and administrative information, during the first half of 2023.
According to the companies, it’s not a mapping service like Google’s. “You’re not going to go in and ask how to get from point A to point B, but it does seek to “democratize the data” so that it can be updated, modified and reused.
The partnership will ensure the reliability of such data through quality control processes, and will drive the adoption of a common, structured and documented data schema to create a user-friendly map information ecosystem.
