Esri and Facebook collaborate on the release of OpenStreetMap Datasets
Esri, a global leader in location intelligence, today announced a partnership with Facebook to release new OpenStreetMap (OSM)-ready datasets for use in building the map.
Esri’s ArcGIS Hub, already a valuable source of geodata, and ArcGIS Online now include these datasets from the Esri user community that are OSM tagged, compatibility licensed, and ready for use.
To work with these new datasets, Facebook’s Map With AI, an artificial intelligence (AI)-powered set of services and tools, will offer new versions of its RapiD editor and the JOSM plug-in. In these new versions, mappers can quickly add ArcGIS datasets, curated by Esri, to OSM—a crowdsourced, highly detailed, and editable map of the world.
Esri has assembled open data from the ArcGIS user community, processed the data for integration with OSM, and published it to ArcGIS Online. That data is licensed to be compatible with the OSM Open Database License (ODbL). Map With AI users can now select one of the ArcGIS datasets, such as buildings for a city or county; centre the map on that dataset; and zoom in to an area where they would like to make edits. Users can review the data and, if appropriate, add and save the relevant features to OSM as publicly available map data.
“We have been supporting developers at Facebook to enhance the RapiD editor and JOSM plug-in so users can access a curated set of high-quality, open data as ArcGIS feature layers, right from the editing environment,” said Deane Kensok, Esri ArcGIS content CTO. “The ArcGIS datasets are especially useful because they typically have been hand edited by GIS professionals and include more fields, such as names and addresses, than the existing AI-generated features.”
RapiD, an enhanced version of iD, the popular OSM editing tool, was developed by Facebook to add AI-predicted features such as roads and buildings. RapiD suggests features that may be missing and enables the OSM mapper to decide which features to add to the map. A mapper can select a suggested feature, make any additional edits based on imagery or local knowledge, and add it to the map.
“These authoritative datasets align with Map With AI’s goal to help mappers expand the coverage, accuracy, and detail of OpenStreetMap,” said Subbu Subramanian, engineering director at Facebook. “This benefits not only the OSM mapping community but also the owners of the data, as that data can now be widely available for use by many applications.”
