In the video, a crowd is roaring at a packed summer music festival. As a beat starts playing over the speakers, the performer finally walks on stage: it’s the Joker. Clad in his red suit, green hair and signature face paint, the Joker pumps his fist and dances across the stage, hopping down a runway […]
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The Overture Maps Foundation today launched the first beta of its global open map dataset. With this, the foundation, which is backed by the likes of Amazon, Esri, Meta, Microsoft and TomTom, is getting one step closer to launching a production-ready open dataset for developers who need geospatial data to power their applications.
“This Beta release brings together multiple sources of open data, has been through several validation tests, is formatted in a new schema and has an entity reference system that allows attachment of other spatial data,” said Marc Prioleau, executive director of Overture Maps Foundation. “This is a significant step forward for open map data by delivering data that is ready to be used in applications.”
Overture was founded back in 2022, under the umbrella of the Linux Foundation. At the time, Linux Foundation executive director Jim Zemlin noted that “mapping the physical environment and every community in the world, even as they grow and change, is a massively complex challenge that no one organization can manage. Industry needs to come together to do this for the benefit of all.”
Now, two years later, some Overture members have already started integrating its data into their applications. Meta, the foundation says, is using Overture data for its map solutions while Microsoft is adopting it to add coverage to Bing Maps.
Overture’s dataset includes five base layers in the beta release that include 54 million places of interest, 2.3 billion buildings, roads, footbaths and other travel infrastructure, administrative boundaries, and a contextual base layer including land and water data.
In a world where OpenStreetMap (OSM) has been around for a very long time, it’s worth asking why the industry would need a project like Overture (which actually uses OSM data as part of its data set).
“Overture is a data-centric map project, not a community of individual map editors,” the project’s FAQ explains. “Therefore, Overture is intended to be complementary to OSM. We combine OSM with other sources to produce new open map data sets. Overture data will be available for use by the OpenStreetMap community under compatible open data licenses. Overture members are encouraged to contribute to OSM directly.”
Conservative think tank The Heritage Foundation said on Friday that it experienced a cyberattack earlier this week.
A person with knowledge of the cyberattack told TechCrunch that efforts at Heritage were underway to remediate the cyberattack, but said that it wasn’t immediately known what, if any, data was taken.
Politico, which first reported the news of the cyberattack on Friday, cited a Heritage official as saying the organization “shut down its network to prevent any further malicious activity while we investigate the incident.”
The news outlet quoted the Heritage official as saying that the cyberattack likely came from nation-state hackers, but did not provide evidence of the claim.
Heritage spokesperson Noah Weinrich declined to comment when reached by email on Thursday, and did not immediately respond to a request for comment when contacted by TechCrunch on Friday.
Founded in 1973, Heritage is based in Washington, DC, and supports and lobbies on conservative issues. The foundation is highly influential in Republican politics. Think tanks are frequent targets of overseas cyberattacks and nation state-led espionage efforts for their connections to government and policy making, many of which are staffed by former U.S. administration officials.
Heritage was hit by a cyberattack in 2015 in which hackers stole internal emails and the personal information of its donors.
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