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Matt Chu Cheong's avatar

This is a great summary, and actually something I’m professionally pretty excited about. Google maps (and the associated API endpoints) are great but they come with a lot of limitations, particularly on the data storage side as you mentioned. This poses a lot of challenges for data-driven work. A more rigorous alternative to OSM is really encouraging!

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Michael H Cottle's avatar

While the Overture initiative is a fantastic development, categorizing it as a disruptor or threat to Google Maps is inaccurate.

First of all "Google Maps" is a consumer APPLICATION that is available for web and mobile consumers to search for, explore, evaluate and navigate to places. Overture has no aspirations of providing that type of application or service.

If you meant to write that Overture is a potential disruptor of Google's Geospatial Platform Services, that is also incorrect as Overture is a data set - not a platform that provides developers with APIs to access geospatial functions. If a developer wanted to use Overture data, they would need to replicate the huge investment in the highly scalable, feature rich, geospatial platform that Google has built over the past 18 years. I've been with a number of companies who have done this and it's no easy task to compete with Google's platform.

What Overture is a threat to (or a disruptor of) are the commercial map providers (HERE, TomTom, Zenrin, MapMyIndia) who sell their map data to application and geospatial platform companies. But even with that in mind, Overture today is far from providing the breadth of content that these data companies offer (attributes for routing, speed data, imagery, etc).

Overture has made a great start and that gap will close over time. But for now, Overture represents a great source of data for companies who have built (or want to build) their own geospatial platform solely to render great looking, detailed maps and to search for points of interest.

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