It’s not often you’ll find Microsoft, Amazon and Meta in the same room, collaborating on the same goals. But that’s exactly what we have with the Overture Maps Foundation, an initiative to develop interoperable and open map data.

Launched in December 2022, the Overture Maps Foundation is an attempt to counter Google’s stranglehold on online mapping. The Linux Foundation-hosted outfit has been releasing early previews of its datasets over the past year, and the first beta incarnation arrived this April. But on Wednesday, we’re seeing the first formal fruits: The organization is launching a quartet of open data sets in general availability (GA).

For context, maps are essentially “layers” that can be tailored to many uses. The Overture Maps Foundation is today releasing buildings, constituting 2.3 billion building “footprints” globally; places, which includes some 54 million notable places of interest; divisions, which serves as a visual overlay denoting “boundaries” separating countries, regions, cities or neighborhoods; and base, which covers land and water features such as physical infrastructure (e.g., communication towers, piers and bridges).

The company’s other main dataset, transportation, will remain in beta for now. It is also debuting a new addresses dataset in alpha, which supports 200 million addresses across 14 countries.

While Microsoft, AWS and Meta are the highest-profile members of the Overture Maps Foundation, the core steering committee also counts location technology stalwart, TomTom, as a member. Other “general” and “contributor” members include Esri, Hyundai, Niantic and Tripadvisor. Google’s absence from the group is notable, albeit unsurprising given the ultimate goal of the project.

Collectively, the members are pooling myriad data sources, including open datasets from tangential projects such as OpenStreetMap and government sources, their own internal proprietary data, and even data from the main nemesis here, Google.

They can do that because although Google’s mapping data empire is mostly proprietary, it has released some datasets under an open access license, including Open Buildings, released back in 2021. As we can see from this map of the U.S. / Mexico border, the Overture Maps Foundation has used data from OpenStreetMap, Esri, Microsoft and Google.

It may sound simple to combine datasets, but the reality is somewhat different, as they generally don’t adhere to the same formats, structures and standards. So you might have two largely similar datasets with slightly different purposes that need to be meshed together to integrate their respective benefits. The process of bringing together such datasets is called conflation, and it can be a painstaking process of checking and de-duplication.

“One of the real challenges when you start combining data that’s coming from a lot of different places is, how do you know that this record of a building or an address or a place is the same as this other record?” explained Marc Prioleau, executive director of Overture Maps Foundation, in an interview with TechCrunch. “That seems kind of obvious, but people misspell things or use different names. They could also be slightly misaligned geographically. Conflation plays a big part in [fixing] this.”

You can read more at: https://tcrn.ch/4c1hUdV.