Member-only story
🗺️Overture Maps Released With 54 Million Places Of Interest
As more companies join Overture Map Foundation the maps get more and more data and layers we can use for our apps
If you worked with map based applications you know how that cartography isn’t easy and setting things up is quite complicated beyond some degree of complexicity.
One of the easiest maps to embed are Google Maps, but these aren’t free.
A great alternative is OpenStreetMaps. A top notch open cartography database that offers wide range of tileset providers and is widely supported with a range of libraries to display these maps, like Leaflet.
Not everyone knows how these maps are built. In fact your neigbour can be one of millions of contributors that update the maps according to the changes in your landscape.
He or she can add new businesses, new roads, modify parks to reflect changes made in your city or village.
The effort of the distributed community that works pro bono is one of the greatest achievements next to Wikipedia that works on the same grounds.
To a point where there are million dollar businesses that operate on maps provided by OpenStreetMaps.
But while OSM model prooved to be successful it doesn’t align with business too well.
Corporate world has a hard time following OSM rules when contributing to the map.
Big tech would like to batch feed OSM with their data and enjoy the even better maps.
But it doesn’t work like that, every information has to be processed and validated. It’s a work that requires precision and cooperation between contributors.
Lack of this ability and quality actually caused a Microsoft contribution tool to be banned from OSM.
