Just finished the article. Did I miss where the author answers the question what Overture Map means for the future of OSM, or it it rather meant to be an overview of the state of things for those not involved in OSM?
One way to gauge the impact might be to keep any eye on what Meta does with its Daylight Map Distribution project (a clean OSM), https://daylightmap.org/.
> “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.“
Apple is also a heavy contributor to OSM: https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Organised_Editing/Activi...
OSM maps are superior to the new maps in some places like Australia, although maybe in irrelevant ways - there’s not really value in having every single building drawn on the map.
I don't have any special insight, but I expect that Overture is moving that cooperation outside of any of the players.
OSM might also feel more pressure to standardize things like tags for features, which would resolve a considerable problem in using OSM data. Both tag names and value formats vary from region to region, and that's probably why almost any proprietary maps software is more useful than OSM apps. Having personally had to use OSM data, writing heuristics to parse tag names and values is a lot of work.
As for criticism of Overture on OSM community forums, there seems to be a lot of vague gesturing at "big tech bad, OSM community good." A more constructive place to look for what Overture means for OSM is the OSM Foundation's blog/press statement - https://blog.openstreetmap.org/2022/12/22/views-from-the-ope.... Which, to my mind, reads as saying that OSM data is free to use for corporations, but OSM hopes that Overture improvements flow upstream.
If my tone seems a bit negative, it's because I'm a bit tired of the negative reaction open source communities tend to have when being challenged or offered a collaboration opportunity with big tech. I feel like the approach Blender takes with big tech (like NVIDIA) is much, much more productive.
Sure map users now need to do cleaning and quality control, but this is always application-specific and cannot be forced to the mappers. I feel OSM balance between structure and freedom is good enough.
Now some map applications are quite standard: eg nice base map and navigation, so for these quite many companies have built own data cleaning/structuring/rendering stacks, where only some pieces are easily available as OS, rest is kept as business secrets. I hope Overture will provide usable OS full stack here. Certainly this will be also specific to the contributors own interests, and it does not try to “fix” OSM into well structured database.
That's a pretty bold statement. There is certainly lots of variation in usage, but commonly used tags are used pretty consistently, the variation is largely in things that "almost any proprietary maps software" doesn't even bother with.
Maps is better because it has all the shops and opening times… which might be out of date by a year or two.
Let's say I want my maps application to know whether a building is commercial or residential. Some buildings have building=residential, others have building=yes or building=oui, and others just have landuse=commercial (or landuse=residential, suburban, quarter, suburb, neighbourhood, or residential=yes, or residential=apartments). This is not the worst-case scenario; we can write an interpreting adapter for these tags. But somewhere in the world, there will be edge-case tags the adapter won't handle. And it is challenging to use that approach for applications that tens of thousands of users will see and scrutinize.
There are 435,057,783 building=yes, and 1 building=oui.
The OSM community has standardized.
https://taginfo.openstreetmap.org/tags/building=yes https://taginfo.openstreetmap.org/tags/building=oui
The solution is straightforward for OSM - standardize the tags. It's been a long debate in OSM, but I hope the commercial influence will make them do it. There are practically no downsides and significant benefits.