Insights from my Software Engineering Radio interview with Jennings Anderson and Amy Rose
Introduction
In a recent episode of the Software Engineering Radio podcast, I interviewed Jennings Anderson, a Software Engineer at Meta Platforms, and Amy Rose, the Chief Technology Officer at the Overture Maps Foundation. Our conversation focused on the Overture Maps project, which creates reliable, easy-to-use, and interoperable open map data. During the interview, Amy and Jennings share insights into the foundations of geospatial information systems, the Global Entity Reference System (GERS), the challenges of normalizing diverse map data into a unified schema, and how developers can build applications using tools like DuckDB and GeoParquet. This episode was fun to record — I hope you enjoy it!
Insights
I’m thankful for this fun-loving and engaging discussion with both Jennings Anderson and Amy Rose. Before you listen to the full episode, you can preview some of its insights:
Why is normalizing geospatial data to a single schema so important?
Amy explains the challenge that Overture Maps solves for developers:
“Imagine you’re trying to build an application that uses map data. You’re pulling all this information from different sources if each source has its own unique way of describing things. So let’s say some data refers to roads as quote unquote streets and others as highways. Or if you have in some datasets, the height is measured in meters and others in feet just because of cultural differences. It’s a total nightmare to get them to all work together, right?”
What is the Global Entity Reference System (GERS) and why does it matter?
Jennings describes the innovation behind stable identifiers in Overture Maps:
“The idea of GERS is to say, okay, well there might be different representations of each of these buildings, but each building is in fact its own building entity, the building-ness of the building, so to say. So we will define a single entity for a building, give that a unique identifier.”
How does DuckDB enable developers to query Overture Maps data efficiently?
Jennings explains the cloud-native workflow that Overture Maps makes possible:
“Our data is all released in GeoParquet format, which is a columnar format that’s optimized for the cloud native environment here. And DuckDB is a fantastic open-source query engine that allows us to investigate that data in situ in the cloud. … However, with DuckDB and with Geo Parquet, what that enables us is the ability to actually query the data in place.”
How is the relationship between open-source software and open data different?
Amy highlights a distinction that is often overlooked by software engineers:
“Open-source software and open-source data you might want to lump them together because it’s all open source, but they’re very different things. … How you build open-source software is much clearer. There’s a lot of tools out there already to very cleanly execute on these types of collaborations, particularly in big projects. And code is pretty easy to think about how you would release and continue to maintain and update. Data’s a very different animal, not the least of which is because it can get really big.”
Why is Overture Maps part of the Linux Foundation?
Amy explains the governance model that guides the project:
“As part of the Linux Foundation, Overture operates as a nonprofit technology consortium. So the idea of operating under that structure is that it provides a neutral, kind of vendor agnostic, home for the project. It gives us a much better way to remain open and truly collaborative.”
Listen
If you’re interested in learning more about Overture Maps and open geospatial data, I highly recommend listening to my interview with Jennings Anderson and Amy Rose on Software Engineering Radio! You can find it on your favorite podcast player, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or you can listen to it with this handy podcast player.