Esri has joined the Overture Maps Foundation, a collaboration founded by Amazon Web Services (AWS), Meta, Microsoft, and TomTom. Overture’s mission is to create reliable, easy-to-use, and interoperable open map data.

Historically, using open map sources posed challenges for geospatial developers and professionals. These include collecting comprehensive data from disparate sources, curating data of variable quality and currency, combining datasets with different structures, testing data for errors and inconsistencies, and enabling integration with other map products. 

These are challenges the Overture Maps Foundation seeks to overcome, building on the work of other open data projects such as OpenStreetMap.

"Ready access to geospatial information has fuelled the innovation of many technologies and products, benefitting organizations and communities around the world," said Deane Kensok, Esri ArcGIS Content CTO. 

"Esri is committed to expanding access to ready-to-use map data and helping the global geospatial community who are building the next generation of location-based apps and solutions for tomorrow's challenges."

Members of Overture will provide data and technological contributions, combining their resources to create complete, accurate, and extensible real-world map data that is available under an open data license. As a member, Esri will help curate data from its extensive collection of community contributions assembled through its well-established Community Maps Program, which contributors have chosen to share as open data.

"Overture's mission to build the best possible open map data includes incorporating high quality geospatial data from cities and local governments. As part of a worldwide database, data from those authoritative sources can support geospatial applications for billions of end users," said Jan Erik Solem, chairperson for the Overture Maps Foundation and engineering director of Maps at Meta.