By Marc Prioleau
The trend of open data is taking hold around the world and it will unleash untold innovation.
McKinsey notes that open data, which is data that can be freely used and freely redistributed, could contribute $3 trillion annually to the global economy and has the potential to “unleash innovation and transform every sector of the economy.” The World Bank also recognizes “the huge potential of open data,” noting that private company use of open government data has “only begun to be exploited.”
The European Union, which often leads in terms of embracing digital initiatives, has its Open Data Directive, which recently added new “high-value data sets” that public sector bodies have to make available for free use. These data sets provide geospatial, environmental, meteorological, statistical, mobility, and company data, with the goal of advancing society’s digital transformation and improving mobility, medical care, energy conservation, and sustainability, for example.
As noted by commissioner Thierry Breton, “Start-ups and SMEs will be able to use this data to develop new products and innovative solutions that improve the lives of citizens in the EU and around the world.”
Overture Maps Foundation
At the Overture Maps Foundation, we’re amassing what we believe will be the world’s largest collection of enterprise-grade open map data that anyone, anywhere, can use to build interoperable mapping services. With the right data, services like navigation, local search, logistics management, and location-based augmented reality can quickly be realized.
However, as the requirements for accuracy, timeliness, and advanced features continue to expand, the need for an open base layer of data also grows. By building on common, open base layers of data, value-added data can be more easily combined and provide better interoperability across platforms. The task of building and maintaining these data-rich, advanced mapping features—required to map a continuously changing world—is too big, too complex, and too costly for any one entity to tackle.
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. By building a wide network of users who consume map services and provide feedback on the accuracy of data, the industry can build the best map data available. Open use through open licensing is central to expanding that reach.
The basic idea of open map data is the same as for open source software: collaboratively building an asset that anyone can use, change, and then redistribute. The open model, pioneered about three decades ago to develop the Linux operating system, gave rise to an open source software industry that is now worth trillions, a recent Harvard Business School report notes. If not for open source software, companies “would need to spend 3.5 times more on software than they currently do,” the report states.
Some of the biggest technology and location companies in the world, such as AWS, Meta, TomTom, and Microsoft, are huge open source advocates because they recognize the value of open source for their companies and the economy. So it should come as no surprise these same companies came together late in 2022 to launch Overture, which is among the world’s largest open data projects hosted at The Linux Foundation.
Overture’s mission is to build open map data that will support a wide range of mapping applications and geospatial analysis. Map data is the digital representation of the physical world… a massive, complex and interrelated data set. To build that, Overture aggregates, removes duplicates, improves, standardizes, and maintains data resulting from many different signals to build comprehensive foundational data sets that are valuable to map makers.
For example, Overture’s Buildings theme combines crowdsourced data from OpenStreetMap, government data from Esri’s Community Maps Program, and AI-generated building footprints from Microsoft and Google. The combined data set includes 2.3 billion buildings, making it the largest open buildings data set in the world. Addresses, road networks, and places of interest are other themes that will rely heavily on the aggregation of open data sources.
Open data vs. open source
While there are many similarities between open data projects and open source projects, there are also notable differences. Those differences may impact who decides to work with each.
In my nine months at Overture, I’ve come to assess how and why open source code and open data differ. I would point to six key differences that have important implications for open data projects:
The road ahead
It took decades for open source code to spread to the mainstream. Open data can leverage the learnings from the open source movement, but will have to develop its own best practices as it goes forward. As that happens, it will lead to new products and services across industries, governments, and entire economies.
Open data will benefit companies that deliver proprietary services on top of the open data, just as open source has benefited companies that build on open source code. Consumers, governments, and companies will all derive benefits in terms of more and better goods and services.
Marc Prioleau is executive director of Overture Maps Foundation.
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