Getting map data right and keeping it right

The world is a messy place. Buildings rise. Buildings fall. Roads wash out. Homeowners add cottages to properties. One location becomes home to two businesses. Roadside business stands spring up in the morning and disappear at night, but still need deliveries and maybe even electricity.

How to track it all? To date, the best mapping services do a passable job. In developed countries, addresses identify locations and allow us to route to them. But what happens inside each location is often lost as situations change. In less developed, rural, and remote areas, good luck knowing exactly what exists in any one place.

Knowing this matters. It matters to people who want to get their takeout delivered to their doors before the food gets cold, or to a person waiting for a prescription that gets delivered to the wrong door. It matters to emergency service personnel, to power and telephone service providers, and to insurance companies trying to get the best possible handle on risk.

Most mapping data today is owned by this or that company or government agency. It may not be easy to share or connect to other sources of data. That makes it harder to get a holistic view of a building and the environment that impacts that building, whether it be a road prone to flooding or a forest at high risk of fire—and then keep track of changes as they occur. For instance, if an occupied building becomes empty or a forest becomes cleared of brush.

A unique identifier for places

The Overture Maps Foundation is starting to change this situation. It is building the world’s largest cache of open map data. That means anyone can use and add to the data. We are adding the equivalent of a human fingerprint to attach to every one of the 2.3 billion building footprints contained in Overture’s evolving data set, the 55 million places in the set, more than 300 million road segments and any other feature in the map. This “fingerprint” is dubbed the Overture Global Entity Reference System, or GERS.

Like fingerprints are unique to each person, GERS is a unique identifier to each feature in the Overture data set, which provides a base layer of information for companies to use to deliver services built on top of the base data. With each entity having a unique identifier, any other outside data source can then more accurately and more quickly attach its data to the correct entity.

For instance, the location of a restaurant may have existed on a digital map for years. But now someone can link up-to-date menus from one database to the restaurant’s unique identifier, a telephone number from another database, recent restaurant reviews from another, a service that enables reservations from another, and maybe even weather data to track outdoor dining temperatures. All of that data seamlessly shows up to the consumer looking for the right place to eat on a map or local search application. The restaurant can rest assured that consumers are getting the right and best information.

Businesses need the best information, too, to make smart decisions. AddressCloud, for instance, is an Overture member that helps insurance companies assess geographic risk. AddressCloud gets data from more than 40 databases, such as those tracking earthquake, fire, and crime risk, processes it and then delivers risk assessments. With a unique identifier for each building, the right data will get attached to the right entity to enable accurate assessments.

Another non-building example of why unique identifiers matter: On any given street, there may be a bus stop served by multiple buses and transportation carriers. With a unique identifier attached to the bus stop, any service provider will more easily be able to attach its data to that bus stop to better inform users, as well as local officials, as to what services will be available at that stop at any given time.

The bottom line: In the digital world, we can add layer after layer of data to the “map.” The unique identifier not only helps to make that possible, but also makes the map more accurate. When maps were on paper, nothing changed after the map was printed. While the map sat in a glove box for years, it likely became outdated.

With digital maps and vast databases, there’s no limit to how rich and real-time maps can get. Having data infused into maps around the world will help consumers, companies, and governments make better decisions around everything from where to eat to where to fight deforestation. Map data aids decision-making in domains ranging from property management to risk assessment to economic development to addressing climate change and more.

The power of GERS

The idea of an entity reference system like GERS isn’t unique or even new in the mapping world. But Overture is doing three things with it that are unique:

1. The identity is attached to an actual entity, not a piece of land. This will enable greater specificity.
2. The system is global, not limited to this or that country, so greater interoperability exists throughout the world.
3. The map is open, so there’s no chance that a proprietary owner may favor one entity over another in terms of what’s on the map and what data can be attached to it.

What’s more, the interoperability offered by GERS means that different data sets that may reference real-world places differently can be combined with a unique ID. Application developers can add richness by combining different data to give a better user experience based on a richer description of a place or road. Similarly, analysts can combine data from multiple sources to find new correlations that help them understand what is happening at a building or in a region.

Also, because Overture’s base layer of data is open, application developers don’t need to build and rebuild a base layer. They just add their data set and application on top of the base layer. This will speed the rise of innovative applications.

The world is always changing. As a result, maps are always (to some extent) wrong. They all contain errors. But in today’s digital world—with ever more real-time data about what’s going on in that world—maps infused with unique identifiers will continuously become more accurate and informative. And they’ll stay that way even as conditions change.

Marc Prioleau is executive director of Overture Maps Foundation.

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