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SE Radio 694: Jennings Anderson and Amy Rose on Overture Maps
Jennings Anderson, a Software Engineer with Meta Platforms, and Amy Rose, the Chief Technology Officer at Overture Maps Foundation, speak with host Gregory M. Kapfhammer about the Overture Maps project, which creates reliable, easy-to-use, and interoperable open map data. After exploring the foundations of geospatial information systems, Gregory and his guests dive deep into the implementation of Overture Maps through features like the Global Entity Reference System (GERS). In addition to discussing the organizational structure of the Overture Maps Foundation and the need for a unified database of geospatial data, Jennings and Amy explain how to implement applications using data from Overture Maps.
Brought to you by IEEE Computer Society and IEEE Software magazine.
Jennings Anderson, a Software Engineer with Meta Platforms, and Amy Rose, the Chief Technology Officer at Overture Maps Foundation, speak with host Gregory M. Kapfhammer about the Overture Maps project, which creates reliable, easy-to-use, and interoperable open map data. After exploring the foundations of geospatial information systems, Gregory and his guests dive deep into the implementation of Overture Maps through features like the Global Entity Reference System (GERS). In addition to discussing the organizational structure of the Overture Maps Foundation and the need for a unified database of geospatial data, Jennings and Amy explain how to implement applications using data from Overture Maps.
Brought to you by IEEE Computer Society and IEEE Software magazine.
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Transcript brought to you by IEEE Software magazine.
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Gregory Kapfhammer 00:00:19 Welcome to Software Engineering Radio. I’m your host, Gregory Kapfhammer. Today’s guests are Amy Rose and Jennings Anderson. Amy is the CTO at the Overture Maps Foundation, and Jennings is a software engineer at Meta Platforms. Amy and Jennings, welcome to the show.
Amy Rose 00:00:36 Thanks, Greg. Thanks for having us.
Jennings Anderson 00:00:37 Happy to be here.
Gregory Kapfhammer 00:00:38 Hey, I’m glad that you’re here for this interview where we’re going to be exploring Overture Maps. It’s a project that’s aimed at creating reliable, easy to use and interoperable open map data. We’re going to start by diving into the world of geospatial data for software engineers, and then we’re going to talk more about overtures implementation and its ecosystem. Amy and Jennings, are you ready to dive in?
Jennings Anderson 00:01:02 Ready. Let’s do it.
Gregory Kapfhammer 00:01: 03 All right. So we’re going to start by introducing some of the core concepts associated with geospatial data and the systems that software engineers may use in order to explore or build geospatial data platforms. Amy, to start off our discussion, what is a geospatial information system? Can you give me more details about it?
Amy Rose 00:01:22 Yeah, sure. So Geographic Information System, so shorthand would be GIS. It’s basically a system that’s designed to capture, store, manipulate, analyze, manage, and then present, I guess is a good word to say, all types of geographical data. So if you think of GIS as kind of a super powered map, that can do a lot more than just show you where things are. So it’s very akin to any other kind of information system, combines hardware and software, data, methods, and of course there has to be the people that operate that system and interpret the results that come out of it. So that’s kind of GIS in a nutshell.
Gregory Kapfhammer 00:02:01 Many of our listeners may be familiar with relational data. Can you explain how geospatial data might be different to or similar to relational data?
Amy Rose 00:02:11 Yeah, I mean, in a lot of ways it’s very similar and it can be stored in databases, queried, linked, just like relational data. In fact, we can store it very similarly. For example, let’s say in a relational database, you might have a table of customers with their names and addresses in GIS, you could actually link that address to a specific point on the map. So a specific place in the world. The biggest difference I think, is that geospatial data obviously has a spatial component, meaning that because it’s tied to a specific location on the earth’s surface, most relational databases don’t, out of the box, understand that aspect. And so when you’re talking about geospatial data, it’s really built to not just, but understand the relationships that you would have through like a linked table, but also the spatial relationships between records, like the distance between things, the proximity between different features, how they might overlap or connect. So following on that example that I gave earlier, if you have customers in New York City, that’s something that’s query able in a relational data table. But in GIS, you could also take that steps further and think about how far those customers are from perhaps a new store that you might build or where those customers might live within a certain flood zone or any other contextual location information.
Gregory Kapfhammer 00:03:33 Thanks, that was really helpful, Jennings, a moment ago I heard Amy talk about the concept of a point, and when I was learning more about geospatial information systems, I learned that things like points and lines and polygons are all critical to GIS. Can you tell us a little bit more about what points and lines and polygons are?
Jennings Anderson 00:03:54 Yeah, so points, lines and polygons are the primitive data types for GIS systems. And when you think about modeling the real world, you can imagine a point as say like a point of interest to which you’re attaching data. So that could be a customer address and you might have other information about that point. But then fundamentally that point is going to have a latitude and a longitude when we’re talking about geographic coordinates. And that’s going to represent an actual point on the surface of the earth. And if we string a bunch of points together, we can create a line string, and you can imagine a road would be best represented as a line string. And then if you have a line string that can close on itself, you can create a polygon and that’s going to be the best way to represent something like an area. And so we can put all these pieces together and you might have a polygon that’s representing a city park, for example.
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