The Overture Maps Foundation, a collaborative effort to enable current and next-generation interoperable open map services and products, has officially announced the General Availability (GA) of its global Transportation dataset.
According to certain reports, the stated dataset is designed to support new and expanded use cases across a broad spectrum of industries including automotive, ride-sharing, logistics, navigation, local search, urban planning, as well as disaster and humanitarian response.
More on the same would reveal how this transportation dataset includes detailed, accurate data from aerial imagery, clear road routes placed next to recognizable highway signs, comprehensive rail and ferry route information, and better handling of complex traffic rules and restrictions. You see, starting with OpenStreetMap (OSM) data, Overture then re-engineered the data structure to create a dataset that is more stable, with a documented schema, meaning it’s easier for application developers to use.
The other Overture’s work with the transportation data from OSM happens to cover, for starters, normalization. This translates to how all data in the Overture Transportation dataset now adheres to a common set of attributes, thus ensuring uniformity at all times. To expand upon that, features like right turns or speed limits are consistently represented in one standard format throughout the Overture dataset.
Keeping that in mind, normalization simplifies and secures the process of analyzing, interpreting, and using the data. Such a setup, like you can guess, treads up a long distance to let developers build either open or proprietary applications on top of the Overture base layer. Beyond that, Overture also validates and verifies the underlying OSM data.
“The Transportation layer of Overture is an iconic map data layer used across a wide range of applications. It is also the most complex, and I’m pleased to see it hit the GA milestone so quickly,” said Marc Prioleau, executive director of the Overture Maps Foundation. “The team’s work now lets any application developer take advantage of this dataset and deliver services to businesses and consumers around the world. Overture data is built open and free for anyone to use, so we expect many innovative use cases across industries, organizations, geographies, and future mapping efforts.”
Moving beyond normalization, there is also a prospect available in regards to installation of unique identifiers. We get to say so because Overture is unique in allowing companies to attach outside data to the Overture open base map through its Global Entity Reference System (GERS). In the Transportation dataset, these identifiers, deployed as a linear reference system, pave the way for users to easily and accurately attach data, such as accident reports, road construction updates, real time traffic or road closure information, with individual road segments at the relevant, specific location.
An example relaying that stems from how location of a pothole can be located on the map a specific number of meters from the start of a particular road segment.
“Using open data as a backbone for transportation datasets allows us to more easily deal with the increasing complexity of capturing and updating the network required by most advanced automated systems and car manufacturers in the future,” said Michael Harrell, SVP of Engineering, at TomTom. “Data interoperability is a key feature of open data and the Overture datasets, and we’re pleased to see the Transportation dataset hit the GA milestone.”
Among other things, we must mention that the transportation dataset in question holds 86 million kilometers of roads worldwide and is already in use by early adopters like Microsoft, Meta, and TomTom for mapping applications. All in all, the general availability means that the data and underlying schema is now stable and that developers can start using the data in applications.
This dataset also joins other Overture datasets in reaching general availability, including buildings, places of interest, divisions (boundaries) and a base layer.
