This group are cooperating to define common data structures and references - for data under their respective purviews - to supercede the status quo, where each

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.