13 ms·

Linux, Amazon, Meta, and Microsoft want to break the Google Maps monopoly

303 points by mariuz 4y ago

andermap 4y ago
This is a relevant read, Overture might be further pushing for unbundling of all the Google Maps services and products: https://worldbuilder.substack.com/p/unbundling-google-maps https://worldbuilder.substack.com/p/unbundling-google-maps
timonoko 4y ago
- timonoko 4y ago
  Apropos. Lowest Layer is called "Graffiti Layer". It serves same purposes, but instead defacing the scenery you do it in virtual world. Graffiti lovers can then but their VR glasses on and walk around admiring these artworks. Legal issues like doxxing are easy. The map contains only pingable URLs and somebody else is legally responsible for the wrongspeak.
  - supriyo-biswas 4y ago
    Going by the current discussions around Twitter and Facebook (by both the left and the right), I don't believe that's the conclusion most people would come to. Both sides want to hold the platform responsible for their users speech, albeit this is charitably phrased in statements such as "companies should do more to prevent (political bias|misinformation)."
docandrew 4y ago
Good luck to them. After a thorough de-googling of my online life, Maps is their one product I find myself going back to use over and over.
- danuker 4y ago
  I have been using OpenStreetMap (and OsmAnd). But the geocoding is terrible, and there is no traffic data. I dream of making a rough traffic estimator based on GPX files uploaded to OSM. But I don't know when I'll get around to it.
  - tpush 4y ago
    If you haven't already, maybe try Organic Maps. It's a fork of maps.me by some of the original developers.
- bushbaba 4y ago
  have you tried Apple Maps lately. By me its 95-105% google map’s quality. And the Apple Maps app has way less ads and better UX. Really worth a shot.
  - ilikehurdles 4y ago
    I agree. It’s been my default for years now, and I don’t even have Google maps installed on my phone any more. GMaps feels like it’s pushing me to businesses that advertise with them, as they get highlighted all over their interface. I can’t stand nowadays when I get an email with an address that links to google maps. All of our OSes have default handlers for addresses as they do for phone numbers, so just let me use my preference already.
  - danuker 4y ago
    In my city in Romania, Apple Maps is missing a lot of locations.
    - Schiendelman 4y ago
      If you want to fight against Google, add them!
      - danuker 4y ago
supriyo-biswas 4y ago
Does anyone find it troubling that the Linux foundation is being hijacked for tertiary interests that do not involve things in the operating systems/virtualization/containerization area but are simply concerns that some members of the Linux foundation have?
- glogla 4y ago
  Linux foundation has already shown itself as rotten to the core when they went after PrestoSQL on behalf of Facebook.
  - caniszczyk 4y ago
    Last I checked, Facebook created Presto and can decide what they want to do with that IP, just like any other business.
- nojito 4y ago
  How is mapping a tertiary interest?
  - DoingIsLearning 4y ago
    I have to agree with GP. This feels like an effort that should be led by openstreetmap foundation. This reminds me of the Mozilla foundation side quests and their inevitable lack of focus.
- sgc 4y ago
  Yes. I worry that they wind up like Mozilla Foundation, and down the road, Linux itself winds up being a fraction of what it could be.
  - dhruval 4y ago
    Or the Wikipedia foundation. Sadly it seems many of these large open source foundations are prone to mission creep and stagnation.
yafbum 4y ago
Yeah but will they charter planes with cameras and build software to process all that imagery? Drive cars around to take street level pictures, detect and blur faces? Somehow get indoor and underground mall maps? Pay armies of data cleanup ops people to make manual adjustments? Process phone location data to infer traffic conditions? I think it's a very commendable effort but I'm not sure it can be accomplished with a collaborative potluck approach vs a very strategic investment with clear accountability.
- mschuster91 4y ago
  The partner structure makes sense, I guess this will be the result: - TomTom provides their mapping data (they already have fleets of cars, planes, people and relations to city planners, as well as live data for traffic conditions. They get some sort of monetization back as the market for navigation devices has all but collapsed over the last decade. - AWS and Microsoft provide cloud services - Microsoft and Meta bring reach to the new platform - MS has O365 Outlook and Meta with all their services that use maps integration - Meta brings in a huge list of POI data and attendance information because almost all businesses still have (validated) Facebook pages with coordinates, and the Facebook app is notorious for being a data vacuum - Linux Foundation coordinates dealing with FOSS projects, particularly OSM and desktop environments - the other companies aren't really the best in thinking in the same way as for-profit corporation In the end, everyone brings in something valuable to the service, and gets something in return.
  - plonk 4y ago
    Microsoft also has a heap of data coming from their investment in Bing. Edit: I forgot Flight Simulator :)
  - ilyt 4y ago
    > - Meta brings in a huge list of POI data and attendance information because almost all businesses still have (validated) Facebook pages with coordinates, and the Facebook app is notorious for being a data vacuum They could also steal the user's pics instead of driving cars filming streets around! /s
  - 4y ago
ngcc_hk 4y ago
if they get apple map?!
PaulsWallet 4y ago
Exhausted with people abusing and misusing the word monopoly. A monopoly and having market dominance are not the same thing. Google has put far more effort into Google Maps than Microsoft ever has into Bing Maps.
- localhost 4y ago
  Effort has nothing to do with it. I don't see anything about effort in the FTC's definition of monopoly. [1] "Courts do not require a literal monopoly before applying rules for single firm conduct; that term is used as shorthand for a firm with significant and durable market power — that is, the long term ability to raise price or exclude competitors." [1] https://www.ftc.gov/advice-guidance/competition-guidance/guide-antitrust-laws/single-firm-conduct/monopolization-defined https://www.ftc.gov/advice-guidance/competition-guidance/gui...
  - PaulsWallet 4y ago
    I mention effort because Microsoft hasn't even tried to put a real attempt into competing with Google on maps before claiming a monopoly. Tried nothing and completely out of ideas must be an impenetrable monopoly. To compare it with the FTC's definition, Microsoft and Facebook are not excluded from competing with Google Maps. You can make a maps app and put it on Android today.
  - noirbot 4y ago
    I think the issue is less whether they're a monopoly in a legal sense, as much as if these companies really have a leg to stand on to complain about it. "We all decided to not really make a product in area X, and someone else did, so they're bad." There's a case for the government or the market to want to have competition for Google Maps, but for 3-4 companies who all went "Eh, just let Google have a monopoly. Competing is too much work." to turn around and complain about it feels a bit rich. It's not like Apple and Google complaining about smartphone OSes, or Linux complaining about Microsoft or Apple.
    - pessimizer 4y ago
sweettea 4y ago
I struggle to see why supporting OpenStreetMap wouldnt be a better course of action. OSM already has lots of good data; is the only valueadd redefining the format to be more enterprisey andor gatekeep some data? Hard to tell from their press release or really even the article.
- danuker 4y ago
  "Overture is intended to be complementary to OSM. We combine OSM with other sources to produce new open map data sets." https://overturemaps.org/resources/faq/ https://overturemaps.org/resources/faq/
  - yazzku 4y ago
    Is this part of a new Embrace, Extend, Extinguish campaign? Legit question, at this point I trust the Linux Foundation as much as the corps behind it, but I'd appreciate being contradicted.
    - danuker 4y ago
      I don't trust the initiative much either. But I'll use it (and maybe contribute) if it improves my life without affecting my privacy or control of own devices.
  - pojzon 4y ago
    This sounds exactly like TomTom plan for EU maps.. Difference is TomTom has its own source it can prove is better that OSM in many places.
    - petre 4y ago
      TomTom is also part of the this foundation.
- timeon 4y ago
  I'm not really fan of these corporations, but most of those (Google included) are supporting OSM.
CSMastermind 4y ago
I worked at Microsoft 10 years ago and at the time Bing was still being pushed hard along with the new Windows phone. The lack of geospatial was a major painpoint for both products but confusingly it's one they decided to not invest in. I heard directly from the VP in charge of it why: open source maps were going to make Google maps irrelevant. We saw it with encarta and wikipedia he told me. Once the open source community gets its hands on something it becomes impossible to compete with. A decade later Google maps still has no real competition.
- bendergarcia 4y ago
  Seems like that vp misunderstood the complexities to build and maintain the product and the utility people expect. Wikipedia is text of historical events. All it take is someone sitting at your computer to maintain it. Commuting has many components beyond get me from a to b. Those also have to be maintained, and actually require that people sometimes physically visit a place to confirm it still even exists. Not to mention all the photographic information necessary to support the product.
clementmas 4y ago
Very happy to see this happen and be open-source. I'll probably stick to OpenStreetMap and OpenMapTiles to generate my basemaps but they'll most likely benefit from the "competition".
jccalhoun 4y ago
I recently saw a post on an android site about alternatives to google maps and since I'm going to be driving over the holidays I have tried out a couple. They may or may not give better directions but the voice nav on both of the ones I tried was terribly robotic compared to google maps' voice. One of them even had the default that it made an alert every time you were above the speed limit. So in town when I would be varying between just above and just below the speed limit depending on the flow of traffic, the stupid app would be beeping constantly. For the first time ever I was hoping for a red light so I could have a moment to find the setting to turn that off.
- SV_BubbleTime 4y ago
  I’m not discounting your comment, but in the grand scheme of mapping, the voice used seems like a minor challenge.
joshe 4y ago
Would be cool to have Tesla's existing cameras collect photo snapshots for analysis. One of the few sources with the scope to ground truth maps at very low cost. At low cost though, instrumenting uber or lyft cars would be interesting too. Or UPS/Fedex/Amazon vans.
- danuker 4y ago
  Snapping photos of what? Creating maps out of photos? That would be expensive.
gniv 4y ago
Title is a bit misleading. This is about the API, which is used by various third parties like ride-sharing apps, and which are probably annoyed at how expensive Google made the Maps API.
randomsearch 4y ago
A useful metaverse is already here and it’s called Google Maps.
otikik 4y ago
They don’t want to break the monopoly into parts, the want a part of it.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
AlbertCory 4y ago
I hate to break it to everyone, but "dominance" does not equal "profits." How do I know this? I was in Google Patent Litigation, and there were tons of suits against Maps. In all of these, the plaintiff strains as hard as they can to find some connection to Ads, because that's where the money is. Maps doesn't bring in much money. I'm not going to quote figures here. In some countries, they were paying someone per search for data, because they didn't have their own map data yet. Maybe that's changed. "Oh, but imputed revenue!" you say? Well, no one has ever succeeded in defining that and proving it. You can be certain that Google won't ever do it, even internally, because that would end up in Discovery.
- rwmj 4y ago
  Surely there's some synergistic benefit? I would hardly use a search engine these days unless relevant searches pulled up a map (not to mention the associated restaurant reviews etc).
  - AlbertCory 4y ago
    See the quote about "imputed revenue." There's a big gulf between "makes sense" to "quantifiable in court."
- ipsum2 4y ago
  Isn't the connection that Maps runs ads?
  - AlbertCory 4y ago
    that wasn't the case 8 years ago.
- jtrip 4y ago
  > since Google's rise to mapping dominance, it has put the screws to developers with anti-competitive terms and rising prices. In 2018, Google Maps hiked the price by more than 1,400 percent, and many developers were forced to stop using Google Maps or go bankrupt. > The US Justice Department began an investigation of Google Maps earlier in the year over concerns about car app bundling and anti-competitive terms of service. >When Uber held its IPO in 2019, the company reportedly paid $58 million for Google Maps API access over the previous three years, and that was mostly before the Google Maps price hike. I think things have changed since that suit. Let's see if the gov can do something.
MiddleEndian 4y ago
One thing map Google Maps seems to lack is moving street labels. When I zoom in and out, I still want to see the names of the streets. They're not physical maps, why not always show me the name of the street? It doesn't need to be a series of static images at different zoom levels, they could just move the name of the street around, but they don't. Sometimes I zoom in on Google Maps and a street name will disappear despite the entire street being visible and it showing the name before. It's beyond frustrating. Strangely enough, randomly highlighted businesses and their dollar sign prices estimates never seem to disappear... However, there are two things that keep me on Google Maps that others don't seem to have: 1. Public transit directions - I live without a car, I want to be able to get directions that use the subway, and I've never seen anything comparable to what Google Maps does here in combining walking+subway (or occasionally the bus if there's no other choice) directions. Google Maps also highlights everything in the correct colors (Red for Red Line, green for Green Line, blue for Blue Line, orange for Orange Line, purple for commuter rail (painted purple IRL) and yellow for buses (painted yellow IRL)), which matches my mental model for how I get around in the city. 2. Web based API - One of my main uses for Google Maps is checking directions on my PC before I leave my home. Despite Google's best attempts to hide it (and all browsers' best attempts to hide their bookmark shortcut feature for some reason), you can bookmark shortcuts with URL queries to skip the increasingly sluggish Google Maps UI and get results directly. I use the following: (regular Google Maps query, shortcut `gm`) https://www.google.com/maps/search/%s https://www.google.com/maps/search/%s (directions from my house, shortcut `dir`) https://www.google.com/maps/dir/my+street+address,+boston,+ma+my_zip/%s/ https://www.google.com/maps/dir/my+street+address,+boston,+m... (transit directions from my house, shortcut `tdir`) https://www.google.com/maps?saddr=my+street+address,+boston,+ma+my_zip&daddr=%s&dirflg=r https://www.google.com/maps?saddr=my+street+address,+boston,... (walking directions from my house, shortcut `wdir`) https://www.google.com/maps?saddr=my+street+address,+boston,+ma+my_zip&daddr=%s&dirflg=w https://www.google.com/maps?saddr=my+street+address,+boston,...
- aceazzameen 4y ago
  The lack of street labels drives me crazy sometimes! I used to love GMaps a decade ago. It was snappy and still did most of what it does today, but quicker. Now it's just frustrating with all the cards automatically sliding around. Thanks for the bookmarking tips!
wankle 4y ago
I didn't read anything indicating they will contribute back to OSM only that they will siphon off all the work and data done by OSM contributors to date; ultimately aiding Microsoft with another EEE demolition. Ref: https://overturemaps.org/resources/faq/ https://overturemaps.org/resources/faq/ "Overture data will be available for use by the OpenStreetMap community under compatible open data licenses." Being available isn't contributing back, Gates. EEE Ref: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis...
- jodrellblank 4y ago
  Google's Maps API isn't an open standard, this isn't extending the Maps API, Gates doesn't run Microsoft, people don't owe you free contributions of their work. "OpenStreetMap is open data: you are free to use it for any purpose" - https://www.openstreetmap.org/about https://www.openstreetmap.org/about
- UncleEntity 4y ago
  It sounds like OSM doesn’t want to do some of the stuff Overture wants to do like serve up map tiles and whatever. And the opposite, can’t imagine they would want to maintain the location of every tree and cow path like OSM does. It’s been shown many times an open source commodification is able to break a virtual monopoly your competition holds. How many times has google done this over the years?
antiterra 4y ago
I’m all for more map competition with Google, but I’m wary of what it means for correcting rural/suburban addresses. I have a friend whose address didn’t properly exist in OSM, which resulted in packages regularly being undeliverable from Amazon and the like. I helped submit a change that mostly fixed the delivery issue. However, it’s been years and the change has never propagated to Bing, and my direct change requests to MS have been ignored. As another example, someone/someapp decided that the road I live on should be Mystreet Dr. instead of just Mystreet. Now I run into all kinds of ‘this address looks incorrect!’ validation errors when I use the correct name. Even worse, the municipal legislation to change my street name missed some procedural steps. So, some maps, including my car’s nag, have it as Oldstreetname. This may be technically correct, but no one calls it or knows it to be Oldstreetname and Oldstreetname is definitely not on any road signs. I also have no idea what data source my car’s nav is using, so U don’t know how to correct it.
- plonk 4y ago
  > I helped submit a change that mostly fixed the delivery issue. However, it’s been years and the change has never propagated to Bing Note that Bing has their own database and doesn't just repackage OSM. Keeping accurate and up-to-date addresses for the whole world is impossible to do manually. I think initiatives like the one described here can make it easier to correlate multiple sources and fix this kind of errors.
plonk 4y ago
A lot of people are misunderstanding the article in this thread. I work with GIS data from multiple sources. Neither Google's APIs nor OSM nor Bing nor anything else is enough for applications with high specs. You need to mix machine learning and available sources. Doing this is a PITA. Sources rarely match one another (e.g. an object will be referenced on both Bing and OSM, but 20 meters apart, with no way of accurately matching them in the middle of a dense city). The article very clearly says that the goals include making the existing services interoperable, which would be a big advance for API customers. (This isn't about making a new Google Maps competitor, it's about a Google Maps _API_ competitor, though it will surely help build the former too.) Just being able to download the same area from Bing and OSM and seeing "this house has ID 234 here and 234 here, that's the same building" would be great, because that lets you gather all the available information about it instead of having to choose one or use matching algorithms that can make mistakes. It can also remove false positives, which also happen.
- secretsatan 4y ago
  I’ve been dealing with this recently and it’s a mojor headache, but the issue of things not lining up is primarily one of using coordinate systems correctly, knowing what things were measure in and what they are shown in
  - plonk 4y ago
    > but the issue of things not lining up is primarily one of using coordinate systems correctly, knowing what things were measure in and what they are shown in Not in my experience. Two satellite/plane pictures from the same provider can be shifted by several meters. Buildings hand-drawn in OSM are rarely perfectly correct, and won't fit most images anyway due to the first point. Conversions between coordinate systems are precise up to floating-point errors, that's the easy part and more or less solved by geo-referenced data formats.
    - secretsatan 4y ago
      Yes, but i’m finding, increasingly, that while we have the means to accurately record data, even accounting for float point errors by reducing area of coverage, things are simply not reported or cared about. It took us a considerable amount of investigation in using an rtk system to actually set things up correctly to get it to actually work within it’s 1cm accuracy. This is stuff like contacting rtk service providers to find out what system they actually correct their coordinates to. To me, the greatest innovation any provider could do is just specifying the coordinate system used EDIT: in fact i am finding it shocking, it’s even invoking government regulation, the simple fact is, even using advanced systems from leading suppliers, vital facts are just not recorded because geographic coordinates system are so numerous and complex suppliers just offer defaults and do the real work in the background Even here, i hope you don’t misunderstand a geographic system as we talk about all coordination systems, as opposed to geographic vs projected coordinate systems
sidewndr46 4y ago
"Linux" ? What company is "Linux"? The state of journalism is indeed sad in the tech world.
dbg31415 4y ago
They're saying this like Google doesn't deserve all it's earned here. Creating maps, endlessly tweaking UX, creating street view, integration with Waze, much faster updates around road construction than any other service, search for companies inside the map based on abstracted terms, 3D-views... any "monopoly" is well earned. Google isn't forcing users to use their maps, Google just has hands down the best maps and features. I'm a die-hard DDG user, but I still use g! when I want to see maps or look up directions.
- AStellersSeaCow 4y ago
  That said, serious competition would also be good for Google. The maps org is still huge but a lot of what they are doing is tiny iterative improvements these days, not enough swinging for the fences to really add new and exciting products/APIs. If nothing else comes of this, hopefully it spooks some Geo org planners into thinking bigger.
  - dbg31415 4y ago
    Fair... but the competition needs a lot of years to catch up, I feel. I had to use another map tool for a client in a country that didn't love Google. God... it was so clunky horrible. All the stuff I thought was simple, like dropping map pins, and stylizing the UI... with the other map it took 10x as long, and just behaved poorly. We were dropping like 40k pins across a country, and the other service didn't even have like a smart clustering feature... so we had to create a bunch of filters and toggles -- rather than just being able to say "5k pins in this city" when they were zoomed out, we had to force users to selected the right filters and then just slow them scattered "blah" as they zoomed. Anyway, totally agree it'd be good to have more competition on this space... but like it's gonna be a few years before the competition pushes Google to do much more than just iterate. Apple is doing a pretty good job with directions, but they still don't have the "business listings" or abstract searches done right. A lot of tools out there are OK for directions, but without street-view... or even somewhat recent satellite view... the maps aren't up-to-date. Like... take an area in your city where you know there's construction. Google's on it, like almost as soon as the construction crews start. Apple... they're not far off, especially if there's a detour required. Bing... Open Street Map... forget it, it'll be a month or two, or longer, before they can plot around construction. I'm sure it's hard for companies to dedicate resources until people are using the tool, and of course nobody will use the tool until the dedicate resources. Google's ability to pull in business listings, and reviews, and good directions... it's gonna be a really tall order to get anyone else to dedicate enough resources to push Google farther.
AlbertCory 4y ago
A vaguely relevant anecdote: in my year before joining Google, I was a Patent Agent, and I got assigned to help Chinedu Echeruo of HopStop [1] with his patent. He was in NYC and I never actually met him; we just talked on the phone. "Nigeria" is almost a joke in tech circles, with all the Princes who need your help to get their fortunes out, but Chinedu is Nigerian. At the time, his was the only service that had NYC transit schedules online, and he did it largely by paper-scraping! They would take the paper bus & subway schedules, and OCR or hand-code the data. Nowadays, almost every city has their transit schedules online. HopStop was bought by Apple eventually. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HopStop https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HopStop
TheRealPomax 4y ago
Ah yes, Linux, Amazon, Meta, and a company that's been running a map service for seventeen years in a failing attempt at direct competition with Google maps. This is just the Bing show with new guests, isn't it?
zetalemur 4y ago
It's a nice start but what we also need would be an "OpenRasterMap" project - a project where we collect raster data (more and more data gets available) and store the entire planet (RGBN aerial imagery) in let's say 1m/Pixel. It might be feasible to store entire planet's raster tiles in 10 years in a (beefy) desktop machine.
- geo-matik 4y ago
  Sentinel-2 provides worldwide coverage in 10m resolution and is open data. It would be challenging to reach worldwide 1m coverage, even for the big players. You may also want to have a look at OpenTopography, following a similar principle but for elevation data.
  - zetalemur 4y ago
    Yes, I am aware of Sentinel-2 10m data (RGBN), there are even commercial offerings. Actually the storage requirements are not that big for 10m, like ~4TB for the entire (non-water) world. Napkin math: - 15000 Sentinel-2 scenes over land - 10980^2 pixels per scene - 50% lossless compression per scene - 4 channels (RGB and infrared) This results in 15000 * 10980^2 * 4 * 0.5 / 1024*4 ~ 3.3TB. This matches commercial offerings like in https://cloudless.eox.at/#data https://cloudless.eox.at/#data. Of course we have to add lower-scale imagery that is often used to provide XYZ tiling that would further increase the storage requirements. Thanks for the link to OpenTopography, it's an interesting project and elevation data is extremely valuable.
julianeon 4y ago
Whenever big companies want to get together to break another company's monopoly - Good. Do it. I've heard enough, sounds great to me. I 100% support every one of these efforts every time.
HarleyBestfield 4y ago
I welcome this. Google simply has too much control over this area. Case: I work for a small, family owned business. It does home remodeling. A large part of how the company generates leads is through the website and Google Business profile (or Google Maps listing). The business currently ranks well, but there is a growing threat from marketing firms. This is not a problem with competitors hiring marketing firms. It's marketing firms or solo marketing "gurus" who setup websites for each city in the metro area and a matching Google Business profile. These profiles are often setup through reaching out to local residents who'll accept Google's postcard verification for a new listing at their home address. In return for providing the marketer with the code, the resident gets a small fee. Once the website and listing start ranking, the marketer tries to get local contractors to buy the leads from them. This scheme is known as "rank and rent" in some circles (read: among shady marketers). These actors add no value. It's for this reason that Google explicitly forbids this activity in its Google Business profile listings. However, go about reporting such profiles, nothing happens. I welcome a break of the monopoly so that Google and others will start taking more action on shady marketing tactics.
- kilolima 4y ago
  Or Google could hire humans to do tech support and address these kind of problems directly. But we know that Google's profitability is in part because they have dispensed with the idea that you can phone someone to report a problem and get a fix. But there could be a simpler human solution to this problem rather than a legal or technical one.
  - Eleison23 4y ago
distantsounds 4y ago
they should be competing with Waze, not Google maps. Waze does all the things you want a mapping app to do, either by flagging traffic events or cops, marking roads under construction, or just having a pleasant UI. I'm aware Waze and Maps are finally merging together, but let's be real, all the good stuff Maps has gotten recently has come from the Waze side of the house anyway.
type0 4y ago
Linux is not The Linux Foundation
davidkuennen 4y ago
Google Maps is an incredible product. Having traveled a lot lately it dawned on me even more. It's super helpful navigating the public transport in Japan, where even the natives use it as well as the most remote places in Indonesia, where even the natives use it. Simply incredible. I would pay for it. It's a tough challenge for Microsoft and co.
neilv 4y ago
Why the name "Overture"? Any connection to the adtech company?
jacooper 4y ago
> All this data and interoperability talk makes this project seem aimed more at the Google Maps API rather than the consumer-level navigation app. This is rather disappointing, for me google maps is still the only thing I can't find a good replacement for. OSM is extremely out of date, its search is basically useless for anything other than public parks, as no one bothers to put their places outside google maps. Even using google maps offline is better than osmand and others. My current flow is to search on google map web then copy the open location code into the app.
- jacooper 4y ago
  Seems like this article isn't fully accurate. the official annoucment mentions plans for navigation and other advanced capabilities in the project.
DoreenMichele 4y ago
Maps are actually a hard problem to solve. When I got my certificate in GIS 20 years ago, people had no idea what GIS was. I worked at a Fortune 500 company for over 5 years paying accident claims and exactly one person knew what GIS was when they met me. I was taught that good data is hard to come by and can be 60 percent of the cost of a project. GPS can be very accurate if you use enough satellites for enough time, but that is probably the exception not the norm. Much GPS data is more like within about 30 feet of the thing. When the international foot was defined in 1959, a great deal of survey data was already available based on the former definitions, especially in the United States and in India. The small difference between the survey foot and the international foot would not be detectable on a survey of a small parcel, but becomes significant for mapping, or when the state plane coordinate system (SPCS) is used in the US, because the origin of the system may be hundreds of thousands of feet (hundreds of miles) from the point of interest. Hence the previous definitions continued to be used for surveying in the United States and India for many years, and are denoted survey feet to distinguish them from the international foot. The United Kingdom was unaffected by this problem, as the retriangulation of Great Britain (1936–62) had been done in meters. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foot_(unit) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foot_(unit) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imperial_and_US_customary_measurement_systems https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imperial_and_US_customary_me... A fundamental issue is that Maps are 2D and Earth is 3D. Additionally, Earth is not a perfect sphere. This is part of why there are many different map projections, each of which distort something and thus your projection should be chosen based on what you are trying to show on the map. Some projections are better for, say, just North America. Maps also say as much or more about the mind of the map maker as they do geographic reality. We record a lot of human or political data in maps and biases in how dominant cultures view the world can be readily seen in how we map the world. There are interesting videos about maps of Oceania that show this very clearly, for example: https://youtu.be/tCsHWmAKCgQ https://youtu.be/tCsHWmAKCgQ In spite of having a Certificate in GIS, I've never managed to do some of the technical things I've wanted to do with open source. I do use open source tiles and Paint to make maps I like for some of my websites. Please don't underestimate how hard this problem space is. I wish there were more options in the mapping space that served my needs. I've looked around at times and found that many of the available resources simply can't do what I want. I hope this is successful and I look forward to reading up on it more and seeing if it may be relevant to my needs.
psuresh 4y ago
Lol. LF teams up with MS! The natural course should have been supporting OSM. This will eventually effectively kill OSM not G Maps. Linux fights monopoly with monopolies!
petrev01 4y ago
I hope they work to utilize the UBID system developed by the US DOE.
crtified 4y ago
This group are cooperating to define common data structures and references - for data under their respective purviews - to supercede the status quo, where each company uses their own proprietary structures (a status quo which results in tedious work - for mapping projects the world over - when data from different sources is combined in a project). That is the "GERS" and "Schema" aspects of the project. It's very much back-end stuff, but the vision is that the resulting data collaboration will improve the job of working with map data from different sources. Leading to the other key project points, "QA" - whereby data from different sources can be more easily compared and corrected, once it's all sharing common structures and IDs; and ultimately the last key project point "Collaborative Map Building", which all the previous steps have worked to enable. Commercial service/product might be an end point for the Overture project as a whole, leveraging all the aforementioned work to result in (they hope) a kind of "mapping data consortium", but frankly what most of us care about is the way data (and it's interoperation) in general may be improved by this keystone effort. Such that, a few years down the track, we back-end map workers can source data from different places and have it all line up - I don't mean spatially, but in data structure and identity.

303 points by mariuz 4y ago

This is a relevant read, Overture might be further pushing for unbundling of all the Google Maps services and products: https://worldbuilder.substack.com/p/unbundling-google-maps https://worldbuilder.substack.com/p/unbundling-google-maps

timonoko 4y ago

timonoko 4y ago
Apropos. Lowest Layer is called "Graffiti Layer". It serves same purposes, but instead defacing the scenery you do it in virtual world. Graffiti lovers can then but their VR glasses on and walk around admiring these artworks. Legal issues like doxxing are easy. The map contains only pingable URLs and somebody else is legally responsible for the wrongspeak.
- supriyo-biswas 4y ago
  Going by the current discussions around Twitter and Facebook (by both the left and the right), I don't believe that's the conclusion most people would come to. Both sides want to hold the platform responsible for their users speech, albeit this is charitably phrased in statements such as "companies should do more to prevent (political bias|misinformation)."

docandrew 4y ago

Good luck to them. After a thorough de-googling of my online life, Maps is their one product I find myself going back to use over and over.

danuker 4y ago
I have been using OpenStreetMap (and OsmAnd). But the geocoding is terrible, and there is no traffic data. I dream of making a rough traffic estimator based on GPX files uploaded to OSM. But I don't know when I'll get around to it.
- tpush 4y ago
  If you haven't already, maybe try Organic Maps. It's a fork of maps.me by some of the original developers.
bushbaba 4y ago
have you tried Apple Maps lately. By me its 95-105% google map’s quality. And the Apple Maps app has way less ads and better UX. Really worth a shot.
- ilikehurdles 4y ago
  I agree. It’s been my default for years now, and I don’t even have Google maps installed on my phone any more. GMaps feels like it’s pushing me to businesses that advertise with them, as they get highlighted all over their interface. I can’t stand nowadays when I get an email with an address that links to google maps. All of our OSes have default handlers for addresses as they do for phone numbers, so just let me use my preference already.
- danuker 4y ago
  In my city in Romania, Apple Maps is missing a lot of locations.
  - Schiendelman 4y ago
    If you want to fight against Google, add them!
    - danuker 4y ago

supriyo-biswas 4y ago

Does anyone find it troubling that the Linux foundation is being hijacked for tertiary interests that do not involve things in the operating systems/virtualization/containerization area but are simply concerns that some members of the Linux foundation have?

glogla 4y ago
Linux foundation has already shown itself as rotten to the core when they went after PrestoSQL on behalf of Facebook.
- caniszczyk 4y ago
  Last I checked, Facebook created Presto and can decide what they want to do with that IP, just like any other business.
nojito 4y ago
How is mapping a tertiary interest?
- DoingIsLearning 4y ago
  I have to agree with GP. This feels like an effort that should be led by openstreetmap foundation. This reminds me of the Mozilla foundation side quests and their inevitable lack of focus.
sgc 4y ago
Yes. I worry that they wind up like Mozilla Foundation, and down the road, Linux itself winds up being a fraction of what it could be.
- dhruval 4y ago
  Or the Wikipedia foundation. Sadly it seems many of these large open source foundations are prone to mission creep and stagnation.

yafbum 4y ago

Yeah but will they charter planes with cameras and build software to process all that imagery? Drive cars around to take street level pictures, detect and blur faces? Somehow get indoor and underground mall maps? Pay armies of data cleanup ops people to make manual adjustments? Process phone location data to infer traffic conditions? I think it's a very commendable effort but I'm not sure it can be accomplished with a collaborative potluck approach vs a very strategic investment with clear accountability.

mschuster91 4y ago
The partner structure makes sense, I guess this will be the result: - TomTom provides their mapping data (they already have fleets of cars, planes, people and relations to city planners, as well as live data for traffic conditions. They get some sort of monetization back as the market for navigation devices has all but collapsed over the last decade. - AWS and Microsoft provide cloud services - Microsoft and Meta bring reach to the new platform - MS has O365 Outlook and Meta with all their services that use maps integration - Meta brings in a huge list of POI data and attendance information because almost all businesses still have (validated) Facebook pages with coordinates, and the Facebook app is notorious for being a data vacuum - Linux Foundation coordinates dealing with FOSS projects, particularly OSM and desktop environments - the other companies aren't really the best in thinking in the same way as for-profit corporation In the end, everyone brings in something valuable to the service, and gets something in return.
- plonk 4y ago
  Microsoft also has a heap of data coming from their investment in Bing. Edit: I forgot Flight Simulator :)
- ilyt 4y ago
  > - Meta brings in a huge list of POI data and attendance information because almost all businesses still have (validated) Facebook pages with coordinates, and the Facebook app is notorious for being a data vacuum They could also steal the user's pics instead of driving cars filming streets around! /s
- 4y ago

ngcc_hk 4y ago

if they get apple map?!

PaulsWallet 4y ago

Exhausted with people abusing and misusing the word monopoly. A monopoly and having market dominance are not the same thing. Google has put far more effort into Google Maps than Microsoft ever has into Bing Maps.

localhost 4y ago
Effort has nothing to do with it. I don't see anything about effort in the FTC's definition of monopoly. [1] "Courts do not require a literal monopoly before applying rules for single firm conduct; that term is used as shorthand for a firm with significant and durable market power — that is, the long term ability to raise price or exclude competitors." [1] https://www.ftc.gov/advice-guidance/competition-guidance/guide-antitrust-laws/single-firm-conduct/monopolization-defined https://www.ftc.gov/advice-guidance/competition-guidance/gui...
- PaulsWallet 4y ago
  I mention effort because Microsoft hasn't even tried to put a real attempt into competing with Google on maps before claiming a monopoly. Tried nothing and completely out of ideas must be an impenetrable monopoly. To compare it with the FTC's definition, Microsoft and Facebook are not excluded from competing with Google Maps. You can make a maps app and put it on Android today.
- noirbot 4y ago
  I think the issue is less whether they're a monopoly in a legal sense, as much as if these companies really have a leg to stand on to complain about it. "We all decided to not really make a product in area X, and someone else did, so they're bad." There's a case for the government or the market to want to have competition for Google Maps, but for 3-4 companies who all went "Eh, just let Google have a monopoly. Competing is too much work." to turn around and complain about it feels a bit rich. It's not like Apple and Google complaining about smartphone OSes, or Linux complaining about Microsoft or Apple.
  - pessimizer 4y ago

sweettea 4y ago

I struggle to see why supporting OpenStreetMap wouldnt be a better course of action. OSM already has lots of good data; is the only valueadd redefining the format to be more enterprisey andor gatekeep some data? Hard to tell from their press release or really even the article.

danuker 4y ago
"Overture is intended to be complementary to OSM. We combine OSM with other sources to produce new open map data sets." https://overturemaps.org/resources/faq/ https://overturemaps.org/resources/faq/
- yazzku 4y ago
  Is this part of a new Embrace, Extend, Extinguish campaign? Legit question, at this point I trust the Linux Foundation as much as the corps behind it, but I'd appreciate being contradicted.
  - danuker 4y ago
    I don't trust the initiative much either. But I'll use it (and maybe contribute) if it improves my life without affecting my privacy or control of own devices.
- pojzon 4y ago
  This sounds exactly like TomTom plan for EU maps.. Difference is TomTom has its own source it can prove is better that OSM in many places.
  - petre 4y ago
    TomTom is also part of the this foundation.
timeon 4y ago
I'm not really fan of these corporations, but most of those (Google included) are supporting OSM.

CSMastermind 4y ago

I worked at Microsoft 10 years ago and at the time Bing was still being pushed hard along with the new Windows phone. The lack of geospatial was a major painpoint for both products but confusingly it's one they decided to not invest in. I heard directly from the VP in charge of it why: open source maps were going to make Google maps irrelevant. We saw it with encarta and wikipedia he told me. Once the open source community gets its hands on something it becomes impossible to compete with. A decade later Google maps still has no real competition.

bendergarcia 4y ago
Seems like that vp misunderstood the complexities to build and maintain the product and the utility people expect. Wikipedia is text of historical events. All it take is someone sitting at your computer to maintain it. Commuting has many components beyond get me from a to b. Those also have to be maintained, and actually require that people sometimes physically visit a place to confirm it still even exists. Not to mention all the photographic information necessary to support the product.

clementmas 4y ago

Very happy to see this happen and be open-source. I'll probably stick to OpenStreetMap and OpenMapTiles to generate my basemaps but they'll most likely benefit from the "competition".

jccalhoun 4y ago

I recently saw a post on an android site about alternatives to google maps and since I'm going to be driving over the holidays I have tried out a couple. They may or may not give better directions but the voice nav on both of the ones I tried was terribly robotic compared to google maps' voice. One of them even had the default that it made an alert every time you were above the speed limit. So in town when I would be varying between just above and just below the speed limit depending on the flow of traffic, the stupid app would be beeping constantly. For the first time ever I was hoping for a red light so I could have a moment to find the setting to turn that off.

SV_BubbleTime 4y ago
I’m not discounting your comment, but in the grand scheme of mapping, the voice used seems like a minor challenge.

joshe 4y ago

Would be cool to have Tesla's existing cameras collect photo snapshots for analysis. One of the few sources with the scope to ground truth maps at very low cost. At low cost though, instrumenting uber or lyft cars would be interesting too. Or UPS/Fedex/Amazon vans.

danuker 4y ago
Snapping photos of what? Creating maps out of photos? That would be expensive.

gniv 4y ago

Title is a bit misleading. This is about the API, which is used by various third parties like ride-sharing apps, and which are probably annoyed at how expensive Google made the Maps API.

randomsearch 4y ago

A useful metaverse is already here and it’s called Google Maps.

otikik 4y ago

They don’t want to break the monopoly into parts, the want a part of it.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

AlbertCory 4y ago

I hate to break it to everyone, but "dominance" does not equal "profits." How do I know this? I was in Google Patent Litigation, and there were tons of suits against Maps. In all of these, the plaintiff strains as hard as they can to find some connection to Ads, because that's where the money is. Maps doesn't bring in much money. I'm not going to quote figures here. In some countries, they were paying someone per search for data, because they didn't have their own map data yet. Maybe that's changed. "Oh, but imputed revenue!" you say? Well, no one has ever succeeded in defining that and proving it. You can be certain that Google won't ever do it, even internally, because that would end up in Discovery.

rwmj 4y ago
Surely there's some synergistic benefit? I would hardly use a search engine these days unless relevant searches pulled up a map (not to mention the associated restaurant reviews etc).
- AlbertCory 4y ago
  See the quote about "imputed revenue." There's a big gulf between "makes sense" to "quantifiable in court."
ipsum2 4y ago
Isn't the connection that Maps runs ads?
- AlbertCory 4y ago
  that wasn't the case 8 years ago.
jtrip 4y ago
> since Google's rise to mapping dominance, it has put the screws to developers with anti-competitive terms and rising prices. In 2018, Google Maps hiked the price by more than 1,400 percent, and many developers were forced to stop using Google Maps or go bankrupt. > The US Justice Department began an investigation of Google Maps earlier in the year over concerns about car app bundling and anti-competitive terms of service. >When Uber held its IPO in 2019, the company reportedly paid $58 million for Google Maps API access over the previous three years, and that was mostly before the Google Maps price hike. I think things have changed since that suit. Let's see if the gov can do something.

MiddleEndian 4y ago

One thing map Google Maps seems to lack is moving street labels. When I zoom in and out, I still want to see the names of the streets. They're not physical maps, why not always show me the name of the street? It doesn't need to be a series of static images at different zoom levels, they could just move the name of the street around, but they don't. Sometimes I zoom in on Google Maps and a street name will disappear despite the entire street being visible and it showing the name before. It's beyond frustrating. Strangely enough, randomly highlighted businesses and their dollar sign prices estimates never seem to disappear... However, there are two things that keep me on Google Maps that others don't seem to have: 1. Public transit directions - I live without a car, I want to be able to get directions that use the subway, and I've never seen anything comparable to what Google Maps does here in combining walking+subway (or occasionally the bus if there's no other choice) directions. Google Maps also highlights everything in the correct colors (Red for Red Line, green for Green Line, blue for Blue Line, orange for Orange Line, purple for commuter rail (painted purple IRL) and yellow for buses (painted yellow IRL)), which matches my mental model for how I get around in the city. 2. Web based API - One of my main uses for Google Maps is checking directions on my PC before I leave my home. Despite Google's best attempts to hide it (and all browsers' best attempts to hide their bookmark shortcut feature for some reason), you can bookmark shortcuts with URL queries to skip the increasingly sluggish Google Maps UI and get results directly. I use the following: (regular Google Maps query, shortcut `gm`) https://www.google.com/maps/search/%s https://www.google.com/maps/search/%s (directions from my house, shortcut `dir`) https://www.google.com/maps/dir/my+street+address,+boston,+ma+my_zip/%s/ https://www.google.com/maps/dir/my+street+address,+boston,+m... (transit directions from my house, shortcut `tdir`) https://www.google.com/maps?saddr=my+street+address,+boston,+ma+my_zip&daddr=%s&dirflg=r https://www.google.com/maps?saddr=my+street+address,+boston,... (walking directions from my house, shortcut `wdir`) https://www.google.com/maps?saddr=my+street+address,+boston,+ma+my_zip&daddr=%s&dirflg=w https://www.google.com/maps?saddr=my+street+address,+boston,...

aceazzameen 4y ago
The lack of street labels drives me crazy sometimes! I used to love GMaps a decade ago. It was snappy and still did most of what it does today, but quicker. Now it's just frustrating with all the cards automatically sliding around. Thanks for the bookmarking tips!

wankle 4y ago

I didn't read anything indicating they will contribute back to OSM only that they will siphon off all the work and data done by OSM contributors to date; ultimately aiding Microsoft with another EEE demolition. Ref: https://overturemaps.org/resources/faq/ https://overturemaps.org/resources/faq/ "Overture data will be available for use by the OpenStreetMap community under compatible open data licenses." Being available isn't contributing back, Gates. EEE Ref: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis...

jodrellblank 4y ago
Google's Maps API isn't an open standard, this isn't extending the Maps API, Gates doesn't run Microsoft, people don't owe you free contributions of their work. "OpenStreetMap is open data: you are free to use it for any purpose" - https://www.openstreetmap.org/about https://www.openstreetmap.org/about
UncleEntity 4y ago
It sounds like OSM doesn’t want to do some of the stuff Overture wants to do like serve up map tiles and whatever. And the opposite, can’t imagine they would want to maintain the location of every tree and cow path like OSM does. It’s been shown many times an open source commodification is able to break a virtual monopoly your competition holds. How many times has google done this over the years?

antiterra 4y ago

I’m all for more map competition with Google, but I’m wary of what it means for correcting rural/suburban addresses. I have a friend whose address didn’t properly exist in OSM, which resulted in packages regularly being undeliverable from Amazon and the like. I helped submit a change that mostly fixed the delivery issue. However, it’s been years and the change has never propagated to Bing, and my direct change requests to MS have been ignored. As another example, someone/someapp decided that the road I live on should be Mystreet Dr. instead of just Mystreet. Now I run into all kinds of ‘this address looks incorrect!’ validation errors when I use the correct name. Even worse, the municipal legislation to change my street name missed some procedural steps. So, some maps, including my car’s nag, have it as Oldstreetname. This may be technically correct, but no one calls it or knows it to be Oldstreetname and Oldstreetname is definitely not on any road signs. I also have no idea what data source my car’s nav is using, so U don’t know how to correct it.

plonk 4y ago
> I helped submit a change that mostly fixed the delivery issue. However, it’s been years and the change has never propagated to Bing Note that Bing has their own database and doesn't just repackage OSM. Keeping accurate and up-to-date addresses for the whole world is impossible to do manually. I think initiatives like the one described here can make it easier to correlate multiple sources and fix this kind of errors.

plonk 4y ago

A lot of people are misunderstanding the article in this thread. I work with GIS data from multiple sources. Neither Google's APIs nor OSM nor Bing nor anything else is enough for applications with high specs. You need to mix machine learning and available sources. Doing this is a PITA. Sources rarely match one another (e.g. an object will be referenced on both Bing and OSM, but 20 meters apart, with no way of accurately matching them in the middle of a dense city). The article very clearly says that the goals include making the existing services interoperable, which would be a big advance for API customers. (This isn't about making a new Google Maps competitor, it's about a Google Maps _API_ competitor, though it will surely help build the former too.) Just being able to download the same area from Bing and OSM and seeing "this house has ID 234 here and 234 here, that's the same building" would be great, because that lets you gather all the available information about it instead of having to choose one or use matching algorithms that can make mistakes. It can also remove false positives, which also happen.

secretsatan 4y ago
I’ve been dealing with this recently and it’s a mojor headache, but the issue of things not lining up is primarily one of using coordinate systems correctly, knowing what things were measure in and what they are shown in
- plonk 4y ago
  > but the issue of things not lining up is primarily one of using coordinate systems correctly, knowing what things were measure in and what they are shown in Not in my experience. Two satellite/plane pictures from the same provider can be shifted by several meters. Buildings hand-drawn in OSM are rarely perfectly correct, and won't fit most images anyway due to the first point. Conversions between coordinate systems are precise up to floating-point errors, that's the easy part and more or less solved by geo-referenced data formats.
  - secretsatan 4y ago
    Yes, but i’m finding, increasingly, that while we have the means to accurately record data, even accounting for float point errors by reducing area of coverage, things are simply not reported or cared about. It took us a considerable amount of investigation in using an rtk system to actually set things up correctly to get it to actually work within it’s 1cm accuracy. This is stuff like contacting rtk service providers to find out what system they actually correct their coordinates to. To me, the greatest innovation any provider could do is just specifying the coordinate system used EDIT: in fact i am finding it shocking, it’s even invoking government regulation, the simple fact is, even using advanced systems from leading suppliers, vital facts are just not recorded because geographic coordinates system are so numerous and complex suppliers just offer defaults and do the real work in the background Even here, i hope you don’t misunderstand a geographic system as we talk about all coordination systems, as opposed to geographic vs projected coordinate systems

sidewndr46 4y ago

"Linux" ? What company is "Linux"? The state of journalism is indeed sad in the tech world.

dbg31415 4y ago

They're saying this like Google doesn't deserve all it's earned here. Creating maps, endlessly tweaking UX, creating street view, integration with Waze, much faster updates around road construction than any other service, search for companies inside the map based on abstracted terms, 3D-views... any "monopoly" is well earned. Google isn't forcing users to use their maps, Google just has hands down the best maps and features. I'm a die-hard DDG user, but I still use g! when I want to see maps or look up directions.

AStellersSeaCow 4y ago
That said, serious competition would also be good for Google. The maps org is still huge but a lot of what they are doing is tiny iterative improvements these days, not enough swinging for the fences to really add new and exciting products/APIs. If nothing else comes of this, hopefully it spooks some Geo org planners into thinking bigger.
- dbg31415 4y ago
  Fair... but the competition needs a lot of years to catch up, I feel. I had to use another map tool for a client in a country that didn't love Google. God... it was so clunky horrible. All the stuff I thought was simple, like dropping map pins, and stylizing the UI... with the other map it took 10x as long, and just behaved poorly. We were dropping like 40k pins across a country, and the other service didn't even have like a smart clustering feature... so we had to create a bunch of filters and toggles -- rather than just being able to say "5k pins in this city" when they were zoomed out, we had to force users to selected the right filters and then just slow them scattered "blah" as they zoomed. Anyway, totally agree it'd be good to have more competition on this space... but like it's gonna be a few years before the competition pushes Google to do much more than just iterate. Apple is doing a pretty good job with directions, but they still don't have the "business listings" or abstract searches done right. A lot of tools out there are OK for directions, but without street-view... or even somewhat recent satellite view... the maps aren't up-to-date. Like... take an area in your city where you know there's construction. Google's on it, like almost as soon as the construction crews start. Apple... they're not far off, especially if there's a detour required. Bing... Open Street Map... forget it, it'll be a month or two, or longer, before they can plot around construction. I'm sure it's hard for companies to dedicate resources until people are using the tool, and of course nobody will use the tool until the dedicate resources. Google's ability to pull in business listings, and reviews, and good directions... it's gonna be a really tall order to get anyone else to dedicate enough resources to push Google farther.

AlbertCory 4y ago

A vaguely relevant anecdote: in my year before joining Google, I was a Patent Agent, and I got assigned to help Chinedu Echeruo of HopStop [1] with his patent. He was in NYC and I never actually met him; we just talked on the phone. "Nigeria" is almost a joke in tech circles, with all the Princes who need your help to get their fortunes out, but Chinedu is Nigerian. At the time, his was the only service that had NYC transit schedules online, and he did it largely by paper-scraping! They would take the paper bus & subway schedules, and OCR or hand-code the data. Nowadays, almost every city has their transit schedules online. HopStop was bought by Apple eventually. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HopStop https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HopStop

TheRealPomax 4y ago

Ah yes, Linux, Amazon, Meta, and a company that's been running a map service for seventeen years in a failing attempt at direct competition with Google maps. This is just the Bing show with new guests, isn't it?

zetalemur 4y ago

It's a nice start but what we also need would be an "OpenRasterMap" project - a project where we collect raster data (more and more data gets available) and store the entire planet (RGBN aerial imagery) in let's say 1m/Pixel. It might be feasible to store entire planet's raster tiles in 10 years in a (beefy) desktop machine.

geo-matik 4y ago
Sentinel-2 provides worldwide coverage in 10m resolution and is open data. It would be challenging to reach worldwide 1m coverage, even for the big players. You may also want to have a look at OpenTopography, following a similar principle but for elevation data.
- zetalemur 4y ago
  Yes, I am aware of Sentinel-2 10m data (RGBN), there are even commercial offerings. Actually the storage requirements are not that big for 10m, like ~4TB for the entire (non-water) world. Napkin math: - 15000 Sentinel-2 scenes over land - 10980^2 pixels per scene - 50% lossless compression per scene - 4 channels (RGB and infrared) This results in 15000 * 10980^2 * 4 * 0.5 / 1024*4 ~ 3.3TB. This matches commercial offerings like in https://cloudless.eox.at/#data https://cloudless.eox.at/#data. Of course we have to add lower-scale imagery that is often used to provide XYZ tiling that would further increase the storage requirements. Thanks for the link to OpenTopography, it's an interesting project and elevation data is extremely valuable.

julianeon 4y ago

Whenever big companies want to get together to break another company's monopoly - Good. Do it. I've heard enough, sounds great to me. I 100% support every one of these efforts every time.

HarleyBestfield 4y ago

I welcome this. Google simply has too much control over this area. Case: I work for a small, family owned business. It does home remodeling. A large part of how the company generates leads is through the website and Google Business profile (or Google Maps listing). The business currently ranks well, but there is a growing threat from marketing firms. This is not a problem with competitors hiring marketing firms. It's marketing firms or solo marketing "gurus" who setup websites for each city in the metro area and a matching Google Business profile. These profiles are often setup through reaching out to local residents who'll accept Google's postcard verification for a new listing at their home address. In return for providing the marketer with the code, the resident gets a small fee. Once the website and listing start ranking, the marketer tries to get local contractors to buy the leads from them. This scheme is known as "rank and rent" in some circles (read: among shady marketers). These actors add no value. It's for this reason that Google explicitly forbids this activity in its Google Business profile listings. However, go about reporting such profiles, nothing happens. I welcome a break of the monopoly so that Google and others will start taking more action on shady marketing tactics.

kilolima 4y ago
Or Google could hire humans to do tech support and address these kind of problems directly. But we know that Google's profitability is in part because they have dispensed with the idea that you can phone someone to report a problem and get a fix. But there could be a simpler human solution to this problem rather than a legal or technical one.
- Eleison23 4y ago

distantsounds 4y ago

they should be competing with Waze, not Google maps. Waze does all the things you want a mapping app to do, either by flagging traffic events or cops, marking roads under construction, or just having a pleasant UI. I'm aware Waze and Maps are finally merging together, but let's be real, all the good stuff Maps has gotten recently has come from the Waze side of the house anyway.

type0 4y ago

Linux is not The Linux Foundation

davidkuennen 4y ago

Google Maps is an incredible product. Having traveled a lot lately it dawned on me even more. It's super helpful navigating the public transport in Japan, where even the natives use it as well as the most remote places in Indonesia, where even the natives use it. Simply incredible. I would pay for it. It's a tough challenge for Microsoft and co.

neilv 4y ago

Why the name "Overture"? Any connection to the adtech company?

jacooper 4y ago

> All this data and interoperability talk makes this project seem aimed more at the Google Maps API rather than the consumer-level navigation app. This is rather disappointing, for me google maps is still the only thing I can't find a good replacement for. OSM is extremely out of date, its search is basically useless for anything other than public parks, as no one bothers to put their places outside google maps. Even using google maps offline is better than osmand and others. My current flow is to search on google map web then copy the open location code into the app.

jacooper 4y ago
Seems like this article isn't fully accurate. the official annoucment mentions plans for navigation and other advanced capabilities in the project.

DoreenMichele 4y ago

Maps are actually a hard problem to solve. When I got my certificate in GIS 20 years ago, people had no idea what GIS was. I worked at a Fortune 500 company for over 5 years paying accident claims and exactly one person knew what GIS was when they met me. I was taught that good data is hard to come by and can be 60 percent of the cost of a project. GPS can be very accurate if you use enough satellites for enough time, but that is probably the exception not the norm. Much GPS data is more like within about 30 feet of the thing. When the international foot was defined in 1959, a great deal of survey data was already available based on the former definitions, especially in the United States and in India. The small difference between the survey foot and the international foot would not be detectable on a survey of a small parcel, but becomes significant for mapping, or when the state plane coordinate system (SPCS) is used in the US, because the origin of the system may be hundreds of thousands of feet (hundreds of miles) from the point of interest. Hence the previous definitions continued to be used for surveying in the United States and India for many years, and are denoted survey feet to distinguish them from the international foot. The United Kingdom was unaffected by this problem, as the retriangulation of Great Britain (1936–62) had been done in meters. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foot_(unit) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foot_(unit) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imperial_and_US_customary_measurement_systems https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imperial_and_US_customary_me... A fundamental issue is that Maps are 2D and Earth is 3D. Additionally, Earth is not a perfect sphere. This is part of why there are many different map projections, each of which distort something and thus your projection should be chosen based on what you are trying to show on the map. Some projections are better for, say, just North America. Maps also say as much or more about the mind of the map maker as they do geographic reality. We record a lot of human or political data in maps and biases in how dominant cultures view the world can be readily seen in how we map the world. There are interesting videos about maps of Oceania that show this very clearly, for example: https://youtu.be/tCsHWmAKCgQ https://youtu.be/tCsHWmAKCgQ In spite of having a Certificate in GIS, I've never managed to do some of the technical things I've wanted to do with open source. I do use open source tiles and Paint to make maps I like for some of my websites. Please don't underestimate how hard this problem space is. I wish there were more options in the mapping space that served my needs. I've looked around at times and found that many of the available resources simply can't do what I want. I hope this is successful and I look forward to reading up on it more and seeing if it may be relevant to my needs.

psuresh 4y ago

Lol. LF teams up with MS! The natural course should have been supporting OSM. This will eventually effectively kill OSM not G Maps. Linux fights monopoly with monopolies!

petrev01 4y ago

I hope they work to utilize the UBID system developed by the US DOE.

crtified 4y ago

This group are cooperating to define common data structures and references - for data under their respective purviews - to supercede the status quo, where each company uses their own proprietary structures (a status quo which results in tedious work - for mapping projects the world over - when data from different sources is combined in a project). That is the "GERS" and "Schema" aspects of the project. It's very much back-end stuff, but the vision is that the resulting data collaboration will improve the job of working with map data from different sources. Leading to the other key project points, "QA" - whereby data from different sources can be more easily compared and corrected, once it's all sharing common structures and IDs; and ultimately the last key project point "Collaborative Map Building", which all the previous steps have worked to enable. Commercial service/product might be an end point for the Overture project as a whole, leveraging all the aforementioned work to result in (they hope) a kind of "mapping data consortium", but frankly what most of us care about is the way data (and it's interoperation) in general may be improved by this keystone effort. Such that, a few years down the track, we back-end map workers can source data from different places and have it all line up - I don't mean spatially, but in data structure and identity.