Uber will soon begin contributing to OpenStreetMap (OSM), the crowdsourced mapping project that lets anyone update and edit online maps. The company has selected Delhi NCR, India for its pilot project.

For the project a small team based out of Palo Alto, California, USA and New Delhi, India will add and modify OSM features like Turn restriction, Directionality and Road Geometry.

“We do not plan to make any large-scale, machine-generated edits for this project. All edits will be made by a small team of individuals based in Palo Alto, California, USA,” wrote Suneel Kaw, Maps Product Manager, Uber in a post [*] on the OpenStreetMap forum. “The team will be using the available data sources in the JOSM tool for their corrections and validations. We will share the profiles of our editors on Uber’s OSM page soon. The edits will be made according to the Organized Editing Best Practices and India guidelines. In addition, Uber employees based in Delhi will be able to participate in this project by leveraging their local knowledge to help identify data issues.”

This initiative by Uber is seen as a positive step by those in the open-source community.

OpenStreetMap is a free, editable map of the whole world that is being built by volunteers largely from scratch and released with an open-content license. JOSM (Java OpenStreetMap Editor) is a free software desktop editing tool for OpenStreetMap geodata.

“Uber sees OSM as a valuable tool and uses it in internal models to help determine time + distance estimates for fare calculation and to optimize driver and rider matching,” wrote Suneel Kaw in his post.

kepler.gl’s point, arc, and heatmap layers (top) and grid, hexbin, and polygon layers (below) provide rich geospatial data analysis. [Source : Uber Engineering]

On May 29, 2018, Uber introduced kepler.gl, its open source geoanalytics tool[*]. Built on top of the deck.gl WebGL data visualization framework, kepler.gl is a data-agnostic, high-performance web-based application for visual exploration of large-scale geolocation data sets.

“At Uber, kepler.gl is used as the map component in several dashboarding apps, around which developers can build other components based on their needs,” according to a blog by Shan He on Uber Engineering [*]. Several others have started using kepler.gl — Mapbox, Airbnb, Alphabet’s Sidewalk Labs and Limebike. Mapbox announced that it was integrating Kepler.gl into its own browser-based mapping tool.

Increasing Focus on Maps

Two years back Brian McClendon, who was then Uber’s head of mapping, announced a major expansion of its internal mapping program. He left Uber in 2017 to commence a political career in Kansas.

Since 2015, Uber has been acquiring small map-related startups. The company first bought deCarter and later acquired part of Bing’s mapping assets from Microsoft.

Uber also needs extremely accurate maps for its autonomous car project.

In several cities around the world, Uber has deployed a fleet of cars with distinctive cameras to collect its own imagery.

In an article — “How Maps became the new search box”, by Jessi Hempel, Wired 13/06/2018[*] — Luc Vincent, who runs Lyft’s mapping and marketplace division, postulates that as maps become the entry point for everything one does, businesses are competing to be the first app you open.

Last month, Google Maps removed the Uber booking option from its Android app.