Speaking for myself, I am more enlightened by (much of) this thread and will continue to keep my eyes open to this. I think we (OSM Contributors) should keep our eyes open to this and continue to “discuss amongst ourselves.” Maybe this isn’t an ideal space (some heat, some light), but it seems some of us found some value here.
This could be a “landing place” for any news updates our community might wish to post about this topic.
Is there anything we can do differently, without knowing a lot more than we do now?
Waiting to see if this results in anything beyond a press release.
At the moment, it is not clear on the objectives of overture and how this affects OSM. Ideally these new efforts could have been fed into OSM.
Waiting to see how his Pans out.
The discussion over at Tagging a sidewalk name or creating relation to street? got me thinking:
To be actually useful for data consumers (in this case: router applications), OpenStreetMap data needs to be put through quite a number of preprocessing.
This is not anything that can be blamed on OSM not being flexible enough or something, but simply it is sometimes not prudent to keep the data always in a form that is easiest to consume by certain data consumers. For example (referring to the discussion linked above), expecting mappers to add the street name it belongs to to every separately mapped sidewalk is utopian, even more so to create a relation for every street into which separately mapped sidewalks (etc) would be added.
So, data processing needs to be done for at least relating separately mapped sidewalks, cycleways, (parkings,) etc. to their associated street in order to facilitate proper pedestrian and cyclist routing.
Then, the 85% missing maxspeeds on roads have to be filled with more or less educated guesses about default speed limits (I talked about this on the SOTM2022) as well as any other rules that may apply in or outside of built-up areas. For the latter of course, it is necessary to also first ascertain which road is likely inside and which is likely outside of a built-up area first through geospatial analysis and/or using third party data sources.
Currently, every (router) application developer more or less brews its own stew here. I see a chance that Overturemaps could build the foundation to father the open source software necessary to transform the OSM data into a more user-facing data set by inferring and complementing data into a more accessible form. This software could then in turn be used by anyone (given that indeed there is a committment to develop it as open source software).
That’s an interesting idea. That said, given the identity of Overture’s founding partners, I suspect their focus is going to be on car-centric and POI datasets. I doubt walking and cycling will really register on their radar.
As a person that works as a corporate editor, I can attest that the focus of these entities is very much concerned with car navigation. When I interact with non-car related objects in my daily job it is because they often interact with the road system in some fashion.
One of the more intriguing aspects of the OMF is while they have made lots of noises about “open”, in concrete terms, the only take on this has been from Tomtom that explicitly said that they -wouldn’t- be contributing their proprietary data.
The OMF person interviewed above suggested a release of something that “wasn’t just a schema” (i.e. some actual data) by June. Obviously a repackaging of OSM data in some way (like Facebook’s “Daylight Map”) is a possibility, but presumably some sort of “appropriately licensed data aggregation” (think https://openaddresses.io/, but wider in scope) is also an option? Another “data” option is a pile of “machine learning”-derived stuff (we’ve already seen lots of alleged “missing buildings” and “missing roads” from the OMF partners) but I suspect that’s less likely because it’d be more open to ridicule if it was (as some previous contributions in that area have been) a bit rubbish.
Obviously (like everyone else here) I am just idly speculating 
, but in organisational terms the beginning of June isn’t that far away and the question may well become “what can we do by then” rather than “would would we like to do”.
I wasn’t implying that they wouldn’t release anything, just that it wouldn’t be their proprietary data and that likely includes POIs (which they for the major part will have bought from yelp etc to start with). I suspect that they we will see a daylight distribution probably with their new schema and associated data as they currently do (MS buildings and so on). Addresses might be tricky from single source right now, so they would probably need to restart collecting suitable open data for that.
Naturally the elephant in the room is when and how they will start working on removing OSM from their road network.
@SimonPoole , am I detecting a hint of you saying “they’ll use OSM data to bridge to their own skeleton, while simultaneously backpedaling into removing as much of OSM as they can, as fast as they can”?
That does chime a note for me considering what I see (an opaque, shadowy rollout). I don’t know how true it is, but I nod my head at those sentiments. “Borrow long enough to clone being alive, discard that host as quickly as possible and necessary.”
Welcome to the jungle. (Uh, jungles have elephants…).
Well even it is just petty cash for 3 of the 4 founding members, I don’t quite see companies spending $7-10 million/year ($40 million/year for the whole OMF) just to get better machine learned land cover data or buildings.
Particularly given that we just established that they are really only interested in car-centric stuff.
Contributing to OSM till they are ready makes the stop-gap they are using better and at the same time improves their labeling data set (for the machine learning) so win-win.
How I understood it is that the data will be free for everyone including companies. The membership fee is only to secure a spot in working groups that will be defining a data model and deciding which data to use. If a big company is planning to lean heavily on this data, they definitely would want to make sure that the format will fit their use case.
I am afraid I fail to see how this is a win for OSM. When they release the first version, I am sure the quality will be bad. But with better imagery and ai models the situation will rapidly improve and other type of data layers will be added. At some point companies and app developers might find it better to use tidy and consistent Overture than messy and impossible to improve OSM. I think at that point we are in trouble.
We are in trouble if OSM becomes (or at least is seen as) “impossible to improve”. That’s why I believe it’s important to keep listening to our existing and potential contributors to ensure we have tools and practices that allow individuals and companies to contribute good quality data to OSM.
Some relationship with Overture so that we hear from those users would be beneficial. I hope we (OSMF) establish something in way of membership or similar.
I, too, find “impossible to improve OSM” to be far too severe a statement. OK, the social / consensus aspects of the project (and that’s only a tip of the big iceberg of what I mean by that) do make it “messy” at times. The IETF (and ISO and United Nations, for that matter) could be called similarly “messy.” But we are not “impossible to improve.” Agreeing with @RobJN , we must keep listening. Both to individuals who contribute, who I think are the backbone of the project, but also companies and large organizations who align with our data (and maybe our goals, maybe not). Our goals must include “the best geo data, period” and the only way that happens is through constant improvement, which is and must be built into the DNA of how we map. We lose that if we become “impossible.”
What is happening, what is going to happen between Overture and OSM is still unfolding and will continue to do so. Here and now people are anticipating whether there will be a “too late for OSM to do anything about it” scenario. I don’t think we have enough focus to do that accurately now, although I’m glad we continue to try to better “pull” focus and better understand the inevitable relationship between us that will ensue. However, it isn’t that we are going to “hear from” Overture, it will be that we engage them, and we must do so deliberately. Part of OSM being in that more-assertive posture includes us talking about things as we do here, so, let’s keep up the good work. Even as the specifics of what lies ahead remains hazy today.
Overture might be a win, it might be a “meh,” it might be a threat. If the latter, it must be identified and a plan formulated. My eyes are open, but I’m still rubbing them into focus about all this.
Yes, “hear from” used because I was talking about listening to users, but agree 100% that’s it’s both ways (listening and talking)
I suspect that companies’ view of OSM as impossible to improve was the one of the main reasons they started with Overture project in the first place.
Yes there can be many ways how to understand “impossible to improve”, but in this context it means “to take a decisive action on a reasonable time scale”.
Since there are no set guidelines about what is consensus, how to measure it or how to achieve it, the community is effectively paralyzed. Even a simple operation of changing one water tag takes weeks of nowhere leading discussions. Like people suggesting waiting another 10 years for it to solve itself. And after all that effort that was put into fixing the river tagging issue there are still some that claim it was something wrong. And this is just one of many examples.
As I see …
the official github geojson viewer is now [TomTom+Microsoft] Based.
so you can zoom + check the TomTom road networks;
Some examples:
But here’s one that I spotted on TomTom Roadrunner imagery a couple of months back: OpenStreetMap. If you can’t see the “GPS trace”, it shows traffic as going from the Banyula Drive / Arunja Way intersection, out to the Pacific Motorway exit off-ramp, straight through a sound-barrier fence!