Mapillary has joined Facebook to be part of its open mapping efforts. This comes at a time when Facebook is building tools and technology to improve maps through a combination of machine learning, satellite imagery and partnerships with mapping communities, as part of their mission to bring the world closer together.
These maps power products like Facebook Marketplace that drive transactions for millions of small businesses, and supply vital data to humanitarian organizations around the world.
Mapillary is building the tools for creating a living and visual representation of every place in the world, made available for anyone to update the maps they care about. By merging efforts, the company will further improve the ways that people and machines can work with both aerial and street-level imagery to produce map data. Lots of exciting results will come out of this, including the data we all need to make better maps.
What happens to Mapillary
Its plan is to continue being a global platform for imagery, map data, and improving all maps. You will still be able to upload imagery and use the map data from all the images on the platform.
OpenStreetMap commitment
The company’s commitment to OpenStreetMap stays. The plan is for the rights given to OpenStreetMap editors to remain unchanged and for our work with OpenStreetMap communities and companies to continue on the same path as always.
Mapillary will continue to spearhead a collaborative model where all map communities, companies, cities, and others work together to keep the maps of our world accurate, detailed, and up to date.
Customers and commercial uses
Historically, all of the imagery available on its platform has been open and free for anyone to use for non-commercial purposes. Moving forward, that will continue to be true, except that starting today, it will also be free to use for commercial users as well.
By continuing to make all images uploaded to Mapillary open, public, and available to everyone, it will enable new use cases, and grow the breadth of coverage and usage to benefit mapping for everyone.
