The Overture Maps Foundation today unveiled what it has been working on: a project to make global map data publicly accessible. At the end of last year, we reported on the platform coordinated by the Linux Foundation, with major players such as AWS, Meta, Microsoft and TomTom contributing. Today, for the first time, a pre-release dataset is being released, containing more than 6 million buildings and covering an area of 88,000 square kilometers, including major cities such as Boston, Chicago and Santa Clara.
Data for the project is sourced from a variety of sources to build up the world map bit by bit. LiDAR data has been used to determine terrain elevation, with nearly 90 percent of the United States already measured. However, the building height, for example, is not easily available everywhere in the world.
The data has to go through a rigorous approval process to ensure quality. Broken data, misnames and vandalized data are all checked. The goal is to achieve commercial grade quality. This is a huge task, not only because of the global scale and the missing data, but also because infrastructure is constantly changing, meaning that even a perfect data set of today is already outdated within a short period of time.
Overture has announced that this is only the beginning. The pre-release dataset being made available today is just an indication of where the project is headed. It invites interested parties to submit data or even participate in the initiative.
