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?
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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
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
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.
@infeeeee @pietervdvn@lemmy.ml oh, glanced over that! Seems like I didn’t properly read your comment, sorry 'bout that
looks like just big tech stealing our community work for free
It doesn’t actually matter too much. They use mostly our data, so legally I think it’s ODBL too, and we can import anything genuinely useful they do.
Overture is a separate project so they can add stuff OSM doesn’t want like data generated from imagery that is not checked by people. That might make Overture better in areas where osm data is sparse. They can also restrict other things only import tags they like, or merge some tags that mean similar things to make it easier for data consumers.
Eh, when you scroll down to “steering members”, it starts to look a lot less attractive.
Not necessarily. Google currently has a monopoly on high quality map data, and it needs to be broken up. Even if they’re doing it out of self interest, as long as all map data is open source and fed back into OSM, it’s a win-win for the rest of the ecosystem. All of those corps are Google competitors who would save a lot of money if they could host an alternative instead of using Google Map API’s, but building out the dataset alone is prohibitively expensive.
My colleagues worked on a transport logistics project that used Google maps back in 2018 or 19, and at the beta release I stressed the product manager to double check the viability given Googles massive price hike recently announced. They didn’t, and a bug resulted in a few hundred k bill, for a project whose bill was only supposed to max out at < 5 k a month for that volume of API calls. Googles price hike and the lack of decent alternatives killed the project.
From a quick look, looks like a nice project. If it proves to be more usable with higher accuracy than OSM and there’s an android apk for it, I’ll try it.
Where is the apk? Aren’t you mixing it up with Organic Maps?
If it proves to be more usable with higher accuracy than OSM and there’s an android apk for it, I’ll try it.
I said if.
