AWS, Microsoft, Meta, and TomTom Launch The Overture Maps Foundation

The Linux Foundation has teamed up with AWS, Microsoft, Meta, and the mapping company TomTom to launch the Overture Maps Foundation. The new nonprofit organization and its founding partners will be working together to create next-generation maps that incorporate data from multiple sources.

You may notice that Apple and Google are the big absents among these founding members. Both companies have their own maps apps that come preinstalled on their respective mobile platforms. As of today, you could argue that Google Maps has pretty much become the default navigation app for most people using the Internet.

The Overture Maps Foundation wants to change that and create better map products with interoperable data. The Overture Maps Foundation will also complement the existing OpenStreetMap community and encourage data sharing between the two initiatives.

“Map data will be open and extensible by all under an open data license. This will drive innovation by enabling a network of communities that create services on top of Overture data,” the Linux Foundation explained in a press release.

The Overture Maps Foundation plans to make its first datasets available in the first half of 2023. This first release will only include “basic layers” such as roads, buildings, and administrative information, with more layers to be added in the future.