Esri joins the Overture Maps Foundation to help build interoperable open map data

Esri joins the Overture Maps Foundation to help build interoperable open map data
by Staff Writers
Redlands CA (SPX) Feb 07, 2023

In an increasingly digital and automated world, geospatial data plays a critical role in understanding the physical environment and powering the next generation of location technologies. For geospatial developers and professionals, the ability to access reliable open map data is vital to understanding communities and building innovative services and solutions.

To support this demand, Esri, the global leader in location intelligence, has joined the Overture Maps Foundation-a collaboration founded by Amazon Web Services (AWS), Meta, Microsoft, and TomTom. Overture's mission is to create reliable, easy-to-use, and interoperable open map data.

Historically, using open map sources posed challenges for geospatial developers and professionals. These include collecting comprehensive data from disparate sources, curating data of variable quality and currency, combining datasets with different structures, testing data for errors and inconsistencies, and enabling integration with other map products. These are challenges the Overture Maps Foundation seeks to overcome, building on the work of other open data projects such as OpenStreetMap.

"Ready access to geospatial information has fueled the innovation of many technologies and products, benefitting organizations and communities around the world," said Deane Kensok, Esri ArcGIS Content CTO. "Esri is committed to expanding access to ready-to-use map data and helping the global geospatial community who are building the next generation of location-based apps and solutions for tomorrow's challenges."

Members of Overture will provide data and technological contributions, combining their resources to create complete, accurate, and extensible real-world map data that is available under an open data license. As a member, Esri will help curate data from its extensive collection of community contributions assembled through its well-established Community Maps Program, which contributors have chosen to share as open data.

"Overture's mission to build the best possible open map data includes incorporating high-quality geospatial data from cities and local governments. As part of a worldwide database, data from those authoritative sources can support geospatial applications for billions of end users," said Jan Erik Solem, chairperson for the Overture Maps Foundation and engineering director of Maps at Meta. "Esri's long commitment to open data and supporting federal, state, and local government mapping efforts makes them a great addition."

Esri will continue to both encourage and enable the sharing of open data by authoritative sources and to help integrate that data into the Overture ecosystem in various ways. This will benefit all users of Overture data, including government organizations and their constituents that will be able to access the Overture data through Esri's ArcGIS software and other services.

"Esri has a long history of collecting and curating geospatial data from authoritative and community sources to enable a wide variety of use cases," said Michael Kopenec, general manager for AWS Geospatial.

"They have been a valued mapping partner of Amazon Location Service, and we are pleased to welcome Esri as a member of the Overture Maps Foundation, where they will bring their valuable experience to the project and accelerate delivery of high-quality mapping data to developers."