When I read about Overture Maps like a year or 2 ago, it seemed to me that basically they were going to create a whole new thing from scratch.

Let’s be honest, with enough resources, it’s easy to see that they could pull off some kind of OpenStreetMap 2.0, where all the issues from OSM are modernised and cleaned up.

What’s really going on? Are we getting something soon from these people? What’s the relationship with them?

On their website, they say “coming this fall”. Are you excited? Scared? What should I think?

  • infeeeee@lemm.eeEnglish
    12·
    3 months ago

    Overture maps is a project by osm supporting companies to present their fake and/or low quality data to their shareholders. They can’t import it to osm because of the aformentiones reasons, so they created their own osm with blackjack and hookers.

    Roads and landuse data is from osm so it it’s the same. Building contours based on osm and from some MS ai tool, similar to what you get in the RapId editor. At some places it’s good, in dense cities it’s unusable, and there are a lot of false positives, fake buildings on lakes and rivers, etc. Shops and POIs are from Facebook, a lot of them are at the wrong position or they not exist anymore, duplicates and jokes etc.

    So as I see, it’s not usable by itself for anything. But it’s license is compatible to osm, so you can freely copy from there. I used it to check validity of osm notes. Facebook via this allowed us to copy data from any page, it was a grey area before. Here where I live a lot of shops don’t have a website only a FB page, and it wasn’t clear if you can copy phone numbers, email addresses from there. Now the same data is available in overture

    • pietervdvnMEnglish
      101·
      3 months ago

      It is not ‘by OSM’. The foundation is not involved at all, neither are members of the community.

      This is big corpos who put together their data, and they have to include OSM because it is so great… which also means they have to open up this data due to our ODBL license!

      And yes, we can thus absorb this data back into OSM, but it is not worth it

      • infeeeee@lemm.eeEnglish
        8·
        3 months ago

        I wrote “by osm supporting companies”. The companies behind overture are also supporting osm, that’s what I wanted to write, it’s not necessarily a competitive project, simply data quality is different, but there is an overlap between supporting companies.