GIS Industry Predictions 2024 – Overture Maps Foundation

By Marc Prioleau is the executive director of Overture Maps Foundation,

Marc Prioleau

Charting the Path Forward: Open Map Data’s Role in Enriching Mapping Experiences

In the last 2 years, I have talked to over 250 companies and organizations that are involved in mapping, location services, and map data building. There is amazingly consistent consensus across the industry:  we, as a group, need to move to open map data, especially for the base layers that must support the ever-growing metadata that drives richer map experiences.

The demand for those richer experiences seems insatiable, which means that application developers need new, more accurate, more timely data. Trying to support all that data on multiple versions of basemaps is becoming  unsustainable.

My prediction is that, in 2024, developers will increasingly opt for open map data to build the foundation for their applications.

Today, map data underpins applications for everything from search, to routing, to logistics, to autonomous driving. As the metaverse builds, and the digital and physical worlds merge, map services will underpin augmented reality and its many expected applications from search to games to software for enterprises.

The prospect of mapping the world, and every community, street, building, place of interest in it, even as they change, is a challenge that’s too big for any one entity.

That’s why industry will come together to do this for the benefit of all and open map data and open collaboration will be the way forward.  By building a wide network of map users consuming map services and providing feedback on the accuracy of data, the industry can build the best map data available. Open use through open licensing is central to building that reach.

The best map data has, up until now, been proprietary. The costs to build and sustain that data has only grown as the demand for better data has grown.  Given a large number of sources and ways to gather and present the data, interoperability has been hard, slow, and limiting.

Open map data will mean high interoperability, which will mean more mapping services getting to market, faster, and more economically — unlocking more and better applications.

We see open map data, in fact open data of all kinds, being an incredibly powerful force. We only need to look at the trajectory of open source software for validation that “open” works. Open source software has grown from nothing three decades ago to now being part of almost every modern software stack and embraced by tech powers from Microsoft to Google to Meta.

Open map data will likewise soar in prominence, driving all kinds of innovation that no one company can deliver alone — and then keep delivering as is needed in the world of map data where everything is constantly changing.

If the whole world has access to open data, as it now does open source software, that means a whole lot more people using that data to innovate and create products and services that benefit us all.

Open data will also vastly impact large language models and machine learning. Why? Because it can take a lot of time and energy to train LLMs. Also, collecting and validating data is costly. And yet, for LLMs to be their best, they need complete, unbiased, and trusted data. As more people contribute to the open map data, all of those parameters improve, which results in mapping solutions built on top of a more solid foundation.

About Author:

Marc Prioleau is the executive director of Overture Maps Foundation, a collaborative effort to enable current and next-generation interoperable open map services and founded in December 2022 by Amazon, Meta, Microsoft and TomTom. Marc is an early and frequent advocate for the use of open map data, having worked in the nascent GPS market and later in mapping and location services. In his previous position at Meta, Marc was on the core team that developed the concept for Overture Maps and launched the project.

Category: Industry Predictions

This entry was posted on Monday, January 8th, 2024 at 11:48 am. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.