Wherobots is excited to share that we have officially joined Overture Maps Foundation as a Contributing Member to support the next generation of planetary-scale open map data. Wherobots believes wholeheartedly in Overture’s mission to bring open global-scale map data to the world while leveraging cloud-native technologies to enable efficient and accessible usage of these datasets.

Wherobots has supported the development of Overture datasets through Overture Maps Foundation’s use of the open-source Apache Sedona project to develop and distribute the Overture datasets, enabling Overture to embrace modern cloud-native geospatial technologies like GeoParquet. In addition, Wherobots has made the Overture datasets available within the Wherobots Cloud platform as part of the Wherobots Spatial Catalog which is one of the fastest and most efficient ways to query and analyze the Overture datasets.

By joining Overture Maps Foundation as Contributing Members Wherobots will continue to support the ongoing development, distribution, and evolution of this critical open dataset that enables developers and data practitioners to make sense of the world around us.

"Overture Maps’ mission is about more than building open map data. It is also about helping users access, discover and use that data, whether for building map applications or for spatial ETL, analytics and intelligence," said Marc Prioleau, executive director of the Overture Maps Foundation. “Wherobots has already contributed to the project through  its support of Overture data on Apache Sedona and we look forward to working with them even more closely in the future as a member of the team."

— Marc Prioleau, Executive Director, Overture Maps Foundation

About Overture Maps Foundation

Founded in 2022, Overture Maps Foundation is the world’s leading home for collaboration on the development of reliable, easy-to-use, and interoperable open map data that will power current and next-generation map products. These interoperable set of map data assets are the basis for extensibility, enabling companies to contribute their own data. Members combine resources to build map data that is complete, accurate, and refreshed as the physical world changes. Map data will be open and extensible by all under an open data license. You can learn more about Overture Maps Foundation at overturemaps.org.

Why Supporting Planetary Scale Open Map Data Is Important

As the Spatial Intelligence Cloud, the Wherobots platform enables data practitioners to create large-scale spatial data products and for organizations to find insights in spatial data at scale. We do this by supporting the open-source Apache Sedona project that adds spatial functionality to distributed compute frameworks. We then build on top of Apache Sedona to manage the infrastructure needed for large-scale geospatial intelligence with a serverless architecture. And additionally extend the developer experience of Apache Sedona in Wherobots Cloud with APIs, governance and optimization of spatial joins and other spatial operations.

Wherobots’ mission is to unlock spatial intelligence of earth, society, and business, at a planetary scale. Global scale open data is a key component to enabling this mission to understanding the world. Overture Maps Foundation data provides an important component toward enabling this mission, while aligning with our vision of open data architecture. Similarly, assembling and making sense of planetary-scale datasets like the Overture data requires the usage of scalable cloud-native geospatial technology which aligns perfectly with Wherobots’ mission.

Finally, Wherobots Cloud offers a cloud-native platform for geospatial analytics while also supporting an open data infrastructure. To learn more about how Wherobots Cloud is pushing forward the state of geospatial intelligence, see our blog post covering the latest Wherobots release: Introducing WherobotsAI for Planetary Inference, and Capabilities That Modernize Spatial Intelligence At Scale.

What’s Next For Wherobots And Overture

We’re committed to continuing to support the development and evolution of both Overture Maps Foundation as an organization, and Overture’s adoption of cloud-native geospatial technologies. We’re excited to see where we can go with planetary-scale open map data for the world.

As an example of the type of large-scale data processing Wherobots Cloud enables with Overture data, we recently demonstrated how to make use of the Wherobots VTiles distributed vector tiles generator to generate global PMTiles of Overture data in 26 minutes and also how to analyze the Overture Places dataset to efficiently execute spatial queries to find insights into urban dynamics.

To get started working with Overture data today in Wherobots Cloud create a free Wherobots Cloud account and run some of the example tutorial notebooks available within that demonstrate how to query, analyze, and visualize Overture data (as well as other large-scale datasets and use cases).

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