Open Map Data from Overture Maps Foundation Draws More Industries and Companies

Foundation's growth shows industries such as automotive, spatial imaging, and consumer all want open map data

SAN FRANCISCO, May 14, 2024 /PRNewswire/ -- The Overture Maps Foundation (Overture), a collaborative effort to enable current and next-generation interoperable open map data, today announced several new members, bringing its total membership to 28, up from its original four founding members just 18 months ago, as more companies in more industries collaborate to achieve the benefits of open map data. 

Forward-thinking members bring new data, technology and perspectives to the collaboration and include AddressCloud, AddressforAll Institute, Camptocamp, Cariad, con terra, Cyient Limited, Development Seed, Esri, GlobalLogic, Hyundai Motor Group, Inframappa, Kaart, NAVIS-AMS, NDrive, Niantic Labs, Nearmap, Nomoko, Precisely, PTV Group, SafeGraph, Sanborn Geospatial, Sparkgeo, and Tripadvisor.  

There is significant attention from companies that work in the mapping and Geospatial Information Services (GIS) sector reflecting the rising interest in a high quality but open map dataset that can be used for spatial analysis and data visualization. There is strong representation from companies offering consumer focused map applications for navigation, local search, ride sharing and social media while others focus on enterprise applications where spatial data is used in diverse industries such as insurance underwriting and logistics. Other members are interested in emerging spatial markets such as autonomous vehicle navigation and augmented reality applications for mobile devices and wearables. 

"Mapping technology touches many industries. We're now seeing a diverse set of industries who want to collaborate on open map data as a baselayer," said Marc Prioleau, executive director of Overture Maps Foundation. "By sharing the responsibility to build the open base layers, companies can allocate more effort to the data and services that differentiate their services for their customers."

Overture was founded by Amazon Web Services (AWS), Meta, Microsoft, and TomTom. The original vision was to establish a community that was open to any company or organization that wanted to work together to build and maintain open map data. The vision required building highly accurate open base layers for map data commonly used across many applications. In addition, it included a way to attach (or conflate) additional types of spatial data to those baselayers in a simple, unambiguous way. That vision has attracted like-minded organizations to collaboratively build and improve open map data that underpins all kinds of applications and is free for anyone to use with open data licenses.

The growth in membership coincides with Overture's Beta release last month of its foundational global open map dataset. Overture expects a comprehensive, market-grade open map dataset to be available sometime this summer, marking its first general availability release.

The best open map data sources are conflated into a single Overture data set. Sources include community-built data, including OpenStreetMap, AI-derived data, government and open commercial data sources. The data then goes through validation and quality checks to ensure that it is safe for use and is released in a documented cloud native format for easy and consistent consumption by map application developers.

To join the Overture community or become a member, please visit:
https://overturemaps.org/become-a-member/ 

About Overture Maps Foundation
Founded in 2022, Overture Maps Foundation is the world's leading home for collaboration on the development of reliable, easy-to-use, and interoperable open map data that will power current and next-generation map products. This interoperable map is the basis for extensibility, enabling companies to contribute their own data. Members combine resources to build map data that is complete, accurate, and refreshed as the physical world changes. Map data will be open and extensible by all under an open data license. For more information, please visit overturemaps.org.

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SOURCE Overture Maps Foundation