Overture Maps Foundation Releases Beta of Its First Open Map Dataset
overturemaps.org
overturemaps.org
Well, that's pretty lousy wording.
Our planet has two completely opposite meanings of when exactly that is. For some of us, it's Dec → Feb. For others, it's definitely not.
Kind of surprised a "global map" company doesn't seem to have picked up on that yet. ;)
Maybe it's one of those maps without New Zealand :P
Many of the websites I visit use that same assumption too. It's the unusual ones (to me) that have a different meaning.
It's not a huge deal or anything, it's just a super idiotic mistake for a "global map" company is all. ;)
it seems to be making new map data under a permissive licence instead of openstreetmap's copyleft one, which makes it possible to coopt the work of volunteers
In general, this seems to be more aimed as a corporate-friendly replacement of OSM where instead of volunteers, its companies with satellite data and phone data and AIs and only the end result is shared, not the process. So you're right that its not really being unfair to the OSM community whose data they seem to only reluctantly want (because it's copyleft) and have kept as such.
I am worried though that if if this gets popular, that OSM will be starved for funding and contributors
But overture doesn’t generally allow the type of contributions OSM allows. There is no volunteer to map out a set of houses or streets. Allowed types of contributions are large mapping datasets, typically of the type explicitly disallowed from being imported to OSM.
> Allowed types of contributions are large mapping datasets, typically of the type explicitly disallowed from being imported to OSM.
Depends on license. There are mass imports in OSM.
this is cyclical.
the data they contribute is generated by people who freely contributed this data to Microsoft et al.
then Microsoft takes ownership of the data, package in their proprietary data sets, and here we are.
Overture basically is a joint effort by several companies to combine all that data.
Speaking as someone who has worked with OSM data. It's great for maps but severely lacking elsewhere with a lot of incomplete data, poorly/inconsistently tagged data, lot's of regional variation in tagging, etc. All this presents challenges for users of this data wanting to build stuff on top of this data. And there are lots of companies that are replicating efforts to fix this between each other. Been there done that. This is hard, non trivial work.
Overture is an attempt to move on from lots of companies reinventing this wheel to get to a state where there is a decent data foundation to build their applications on.
And they are releasing that data under an open license. So, there's a lot to like here. The process of how this data is produced is not as open unfortunately and it is unfortunate that they are doing this outside of the openstreetmap community.
But then perhaps that community wasn't that welcoming to get such a thing done? Nor have they seem capable or willing to do such work themselves. Overture are clearly working around them and it's worth spending some time reflecting on whether that could have worked differently and what would have had to change on both sides for that to happen.
We can, we have. So are they ignoring OpenStreetMap?
OSM POI data is definitely severely lacking a lot of regions -- so it makes sense why they'd source that from somewhere else. It's also pretty cool that meta and microsoft's POI data is now open -- from look at it, it has the opposite problem of OSM: there are a lot of businesses in it that don't exist anymore or whose info isn't totally accurate -- but it's very usable for certain use cases (and, funnily enough, could certainly form the starting point for a clean up effort -- that COULD then be stuck in OSM and licensed under OdBL).
The Overture Maps Foundation's main aim seems to be to release comprehensive geodata with a consistent structure (schema).
"""Overture is dedicated to the development of reliable, easy-to-use, and interoperable open map data that will power current and next-generation map products."""
https://overturemaps.org/about/who-we-are/
The data and accompanying schema are primarily oriented toward the developer community and can be found on the Overture Maps Foundation website's downloads and documentation sections.
Most of these are now either using OSM, which is not that great compared to Google, using Google Maps against Google's ToS and hoping nobody notices, or licensing something proprietary (like Here Maps), with very spotty availability outside western rich countries.