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Comment by tony_cannistra | Hacker News Reader

For context, Overture Maps is a project that intends to enable large players in the geospatial space (TomTom, Amazon, Microsoft, but notably _not_ Google) to leverage open data sets (OpenStreetMap among them) alongside proprietary data and processes that they own.

The consortium intends to enable a framework for enhancing geospatial data based in open data sets (e.g. OSM) with their own proprietary processes, and re-release it with a permissive license (the Community Database License Agreement - CDLAv2), but keep the data and processes required to create that dataset proprietary.

The project has created a lot of conversation in the OpenStreetMap community, but in general I think it's good to see so many resources put into the OSM-adjacent world.

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Another bit of context: OSM mappers were quite discontent with edits of many of Overture members. Be it low-paid contractors or bulk importing stuff that AI derived from satellite imagery.

> bulk importing stuff that AI derived from satellite imagery.

That's a thing? This must explain why Google Maps turned into shit over the last few years. Google seems obsessed with replacing humans with half-assed automation.

Yes, indeed. Google AI mapped skylights (roof windows) on a shopping mall near me as buildings.

In my city they made several buildings that overlap a river, and several more that overlap each other. It's been like that for at least 3 years.

Sounds like a fun city!

I don't understand why big corporations find it so hard to see that the real potential in AI is usually in augmenting, not _replacing_, human labor

Imagine how useful tools like that can be if they just had a human review process. That added step in the process not only improves the quality of the final data but provides important feedback to improve the tool itself

> I don't understand why big corporations find it so hard to see that the real potential in AI is usually in augmenting, not _replacing_, human labor

IMHO because now I have twice as much work: knowing the problem domain and reviewing someone else's contribution. It's like code review 24/7 from untrusted contributors: it requires more focus than just trying to understand and author the original contribution

Not entirely like that; it's mostly fixing small edge cases when the bulk of the work has been done correctly. Think about e.g. automatic background removal from photos: most of the time you only need to introduce small corrections, instead of painstakingly tracing shapes by hand. But without these corrections the results are often slightly but visibly incorrect.

> Not entirely like that; it's mostly fixing small edge cases when the bulk of the work has been done correctly

Well, I guess one can just continue to prompt any such AI over and over "have you done it correctly? No? Then try harder"

I recognize that my experiences and expectations from AI differ from seemingly the vast majority of users who get benefit from it. I'm glad for them, but I don't ever want to opt-in to having "AI assistance" because with the current state of the art it generates more work for me than value in my life

Do you know when these contributions began? Has the scene changed much since then?

First known corporation detected by https://piebro.github.io/openstreetmap-statistics/#b34d was in 2008.

How do they do that? I thought OSM was licensed in such a way that if you combine it with other data, the whole thing needed to be released with the same license?

You are mostly right, except that in addition to the same license, the Share-Alike provision in the OSM license (the ODbL [0]) also enables derivatives to be re-released with "A compatible license."

I am not a lawyer, but I would assume someone at Overture has deemed their license (the CDLAv2 [1]) to be "compatible" with ODbL. (edit: From the link in OP, the OSM-based data is being released with ODbL. I think I'm wrong about license compatibility. Again, not a lawyer.).

[0]: https://opendatacommons.org/licenses/odbl/1-0/ [1]: https://cdla.dev/permissive-2-0/

CDLA Permissive is not downstream compatible with ODbL. ODbL is a sharealike licence, CDLA Permissive (as the name suggests) isn’t. Overture can’t relicense OSM-derived content under CDLA Permissive.

From a brief skim of the landing page, it looks like the OSM-derived content is not being offered permissively. See https://overturemaps.org/download/.

You're right, I was mistaken.

These things don’t matter when one side has 100x the lawyers of the other side.

Not exactly.

Are they releasing OSM data or OSM derived data on CDLAv2 anywhere, right now?

There was issue like this in past but it was resolved.

Are they releasing OSM data or OSM derived data on CDLAv2 anywhere?

It would be super helpful if they at least released the name of their data sources.

The places layer would be invaluable for (for example, stuff I'm working on now) geospatial healthcare access analytics if I could rely on the places being a reasonably accurate source of provider locations.

It's a lot of work to tie all the CMS data with health plan data etc.. and then to geocode it all with OSM tiger geocoders. If I could rely on that data already being present and scrubbed, it would be a godsend.

Your project is really interesting to me - are you just looking at the physical buildings (e.g. you have 5 urgent cares within X distance), or are you trying to cross-reference provider data to number doctors/specialties? Or something else entirely?

Totally understand if you can’t discuss (or don’t want to), but it’s in my domain and I’ve spent a fair amount of time thinking about how to do it without coming up with much, so I’m super curious about your thoughts.

I came to ask for this info so thanks for the succinct summary!

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