Comment by solardev | Hacker News Reader

Comment by solardev | Hacker News Reader

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.

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.

s/a competing standard/a gated community/

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