From VentureBeat by Victor Dey.
The release showcases new features planned for integration into previous open-sourced releases. The updated map data now includes over six million building heights across 34,000 square miles in major U.S. cities such as Boston, Chicago and Santa Clara. This data was developed through a combination of efforts using several sources: the United States Geological Survey (USGS) 3D Elevation Program; building footprints from OpenStreetMap; Microsoft open building footprint data; and community sources.
The foundation’s goal is to build a map dataset that caters to the needs of map service providers in an evolving mapping market.
“The new data will support thousands of mapping and location-based applications, unlocking many new use cases,” said Marc Prioleau, head of business development, mapping and location at Meta, who is involved in the project. “This release in April is the first output from the project, whose work began in January. This is not a production release; it is intended to demonstrate the types of data Overture plans to build.”
AWS, Microsoft, Meta and TomTom launched Overture in December under the Linux Foundation. The intention is to build a community of companies, government agencies and other parties that collaboratively build high-accuracy, high-fidelity open map data as a shared asset that anyone can use for location-based applications.
The results should include a common, well-structured data schema to help make maps easier to use, and a global entity reference system to link entities from different datasets to their corresponding real-world entities.
For the complete article on the Overture Maps Foundation CLICK HERE.
