INTERVIEW
Open Map Data Sparks Creativity, Innovation A conversation on the possibilities of reliable open data in 3D mapping, spurring economic growth, and the Overture Maps Foundation’s role ahead.
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We are building a broad coalition with different perspectives and knowledge. My goal is that we can leverage that to build an open map data set that meets many of the needs of these markets now and into the future”, says Marc Priloeau, Executive Director, Overture Maps Foundation, in an interview with Geospatial World.
What is Overture Maps Foundation? Overture Maps Foundation (Overture) was formed to create reliable, easy-to-use, and interoperable open map data for the globe. This open map data can be used to power current and next-gen map products and services to support mapping professionals and developers. Overture is building a global, open map dataset that will be driven by the market needs for more accurate, more featured, and more up-to-date maps. It intends to build this data through open collaboration across many organizations and to provide the resulting data under permissive open data licenses. This will establish a foundation of global, open map data that can support advanced, interoperable map and location services.
What value will Overture bring to the government entities that build and provide open map data? 34 | www.geospatialworld.net | May-June 2023
Overture has been talking to government agencies at all levels to understand how the project can support open data initiatives. From our discussions to date, we have identified the following areas of potential value: By including open government data in a global dataset, the value of that data increases through the connection to other data and users. This integration makes it usable by billions of people around the world in applications that require a global database, which increases the impact of an open dataset beyond what it would be on a stand-alone basis. The technology companies in Overture have significant resources for AI, computer vision, machine learning, data aggregation and conflation. These technologies can be used to process data such as aerial LIDAR or street-level imagery into map data that can be used to create or enrich other data. Feedback generated through the usage of map data is an important source of information, especially in cases where data is inaccurate or has changed. Overture will bring different mapping signals from high volume usage to bear and will build feedback loops to capture and process data about changes in the world. This can help the contributing agencies
understand where the world has changed and where data may need to be refreshed. We are still validating these value propositions and hope to refine and improve them through collaboration with these owners of open government data.
You recently released the Global Entity Referencing System to boost geospatial data interoperability. Tell us more about it? Overture's Global Entity Reference System (GERS) is a system of structuring, encoding, and referencing map data to a shared universal reference. This will provide a mechanism to conflate datasets from different providers based on a specific GERS ID assigned to each feature. Part of the work Overture is doing is to build this stable ID system and a process for attaching a GERS ID to map features. This is hard to do, but an amazingly powerful component of the plan for Overture. The benefit of adding a stable identifier to different features on maps means that you can now start attaching all kinds of other data to those features to enable all sorts of use cases. Additionally, those attached data sets can be from different sources if we all agree on a common identifier for that feature. For example, two geospatial datasets that contain