Overture Maps Foundation: Amazon, Meta, Microsoft and TomTom will help with an alternative to Google and Apple maps

Today’s map applications greatly simplify modern life. They not only help to navigate in an unfamiliar area, but also to find, for example, certain locations and institutions, their work schedules, contacts, reviews, etc. But there aren’t many big players in this arena, and their APIs aren’t free to use.

So Amazon, Meta, Microsoft and TomTom founded the Overture Maps Foundation late last year, an open source project that will provide data for map developers, which can significantly help in the development of competitors to Google Maps or Apple Maps.

TheVerge drew attention to this.

“The Places dataset, in particular, represents a major, previously unavailable open dataset, with the potential to map everything from new businesses big and small to pop-up street markets located anywhere in the world,” Marc Prioleau, Overture’s executive director, says. “Overture plans to build a broad collaboration that can build and maintain an up-to-date, comprehensive database of POIs [places of interest].”

The first dataset is ready. It contains more than 59 million points of interest, data on buildings, transport networks and administrative boundaries. Interested developers can already familiarize themselves with the data by downloading it from the Overture website.