Overture Maps Foundation | Hacker News Reader

Overture Maps Foundation

overturemaps.org

90 pointshampelm28 comments

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?

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.

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/

Thank you. This is exactly what I was wondering

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?

it's like DisneyLand, except maybe more like WestWorld

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.

What's the licensure/legal restriction in using OpenStreetMap aside from including attribution?

OSM data is licensed via the Open Database License (ODbL) - of particular interest to the folks in this consortium is the `share-alike` provision of that license, which posits that you can make derivative databases of the data (such as augmenting it with other data/metadata) as long as you assign the ODbL to the derivative data.

This is a problem if you have proprietary data that you want to use to augment OSM. Some interpretation here: https://wiki.osmfoundation.org/wiki/Licence/Licence_and_Lega...?

tl;dr from that document:

> "...if you improve our data and then distribute it, you need to share your improvements with the general public at no charge. A painless way to do that is to contribute your improvements directly back to OpenStreetMap."

It has a viral license, any data you mix with OSM data becomes open source.

Data sources that people commonly want to blend with mapping data have legal and regulatory restrictions with respect to privacy, data jurisdiction, acceptable use, statutory time limits, contract terms, etc. The OSM license terms are in conflict with legal and regulatory compliance requirements.

This is particularly true for governments. I know the United States Geological Survey wanted to use OSM data for portions of their cartography, but can't because it's not public domain (as their products must be).

Though Overture also aren’t proposing public domain; they’re using a (newish, untested) permissive licence, CDLA.

Not really. Any Derivative Data needs to be licensed under the same or compatible license IF it is Publicly Used [4.4a]. You can internally use it without issues. And you can have a Collective Database which includes it without licensing the entire database under the same license [4.5a].

See: https://opendatacommons.org/licenses/odbl/1-0/

You may disagree, but the legal departments of every organization I've worked for that has looked into the matter concurs with this opinion. It effectively prohibits many practical applications for which organizations want to use mapping data for more than rendering maps. Companies that do use OSM data have rigid policies that only allow it to be used in narrow contexts.

The loophole that most companies seem to have landed on is using OSM data to do parallel construction of private data, which technically avoids the Derivative Database problem.

In the FAQ they state that they will "combine OSM with other sources to produce new open map data sets. Overture data will be available for use by the OSM community under compatible open data licenses."

Anything combined with OSM will be a derivative dataset. So the whole project will have to be released under the ODbL license. Or something compatible with it. I don't think this will really help anyone get away from those issues.

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

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

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.

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

I see, thanks for the details! I stand corrected.

So embrace, extend, extinguish?

Maybe if the extinguish google or esri that would be a good thing. Way too many money changers in the spatial domain. It makes me want to found a startup to democratize the democratization of democratized foo.

s/a competing standard/a gated community/

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

Not to mention algorithmically generated data, e.g. ML on satellite imagery, which some folks in the OSM community are vehemently opposed to.

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