Oh the places you’ll go with spatial data

**Ryan Donovan** (0:07)
Hello, everyone, and welcome to The Stack Overflow Podcast, a place to talk all things software and technology.
I am your host, Ryan Donovan, and today we're talking about maps data and the collaboration between The Overture Maps Foundation and Microsoft Maps. My guests for that today are Jeffrey Hightower, VP of Places Data at Microsoft, and Amy Rose, CTO of The Overture Maps Foundation. So welcome to the show, both of you.

**Amy Rose** (0:35)
Thanks for having me.

**Jeffrey Hightower** (0:36)
Thanks.

**Ryan Donovan** (0:37)
Before we get into mapping the topic today, can you give us a little insight into how you got into software and technology?

**Amy Rose** (0:45)
I kind of stumbled across geography and GIS when I was an undergrad. I was changing my major actually from landscape architecture. And so happened across geography and it was at a time when GIS was kind of just getting started before Google Earth, before smartphones, before GPS and cars. So it was really early on, but even though it was a niche area, I really liked the combination of the visual and analytical, and I really loved working with data. So it was a really good fit. Been doing it ever since.

**Jeffrey Hightower** (1:12)
I've always kind of been into technology as a main line, as a bit of a side hobby. And then the location side of it, I mean, early 90s, I ripped apart my car and built a positioning system into it, and sort of one of those self nerd projects while I was in school for other things. And then really got into that and worked on device positioning for a while, and then spent a bunch of time in a research lab, spent a bunch of time working at Google actually on map things, and more recently, I'm here at Microsoft.

**Ryan Donovan** (1:42)
I think most people's interface with Maps data is through a mapping application, right? You're driving along in your car, and you've got these road segments that tells you to shift left when you're staying on the same road, but you're also doing accessing maps through XY coordinates.
What exactly is map data as a data set?

**Amy Rose** (2:04)
It can be a lot of things, but I think you hit the nail on the head. Map data is anything with a coordinate location. That could be a single coordinate XY location. It could actually have a Z on it. It could be a collection of those coordinates that form a boundary or a transportation segment. But it's regular data, but that has a spatial geometry associated with it. So you can also think of it as location data, physical data, but generally something that has a location.

**Ryan Donovan** (2:33)
For a lot of mapping data, it's obviously more than just the XY coordinates, Z coordinates. It has features. How are those features and everything gathered and understood in the data?

**Jeffrey Hightower** (2:47)
I mean, a huge variety of ways. There's some things that are gathered manually in the field. There's some things that are measured. There's some things that are collected by users directly.
There's a huge variety of ways. We usually think of the data as different segments or different layers, where the one you spoke of is often called the transportation layer, the roads, the sidewalks, the train tracks, the things like that. There's other layers. There's natural features. Where are the parks, the mountains? Those pieces, there's local businesses, there's addresses that we usually break it down by different categories like that. Each category will have geographic and other attributes associated with them. This is a one-way street. This is forested. This is all of that.

**Ryan Donovan** (3:33)
Obviously, Microsoft has a mapping product for Bing Maps.
I suspect everybody understands who Microsoft is. But the Overture Map Foundation, Amy, can you give us a little bit of insight into what you do, how you handle mapping data, and a little bit on what this partnership means?

**Amy Rose** (3:52)
Yeah, so Overture was founded in late 2022 The idea was to bring together organizations across all sectors to create global spatial data sets that are open, standardized, and interoperable. And the interoperable piece is really important.
The idea was to do this in a way that you're building the foundation. So you see a lot of organizations that are doing the same thing just to build foundational map data, and that might not even be their core business. So thinking about, hey, why don't we stop duplicating effort and resources in time, do this together in a collaborative way, put it out in the open, make it interoperable, and then we can focus our time and our resources more on our core business. And so that collaboration was founded by Microsoft, Meta, AWS, and TomTom, and Esri joined shortly thereafter. And now we're almost at about 50 organizations that are members across academic, nonprofit, public, and private sector.