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Mar 10th, 2020
This announcement was originally published as an OSM Diary post.
Facebook is releasing a complete, downloadable preview of OpenStreetMap data we plan to start using in a number of our public maps.
📥 Download Daylight Map Distribution right now in OpenStreetMap PBF format: 📦 planet-v0.1.osm.pbf (42GB).
At Facebook, we use maps to let our users find friends, businesses, groups and much more. OpenStreetMap (OSM), the open source wiki map, has a substantial global footprint of map data built and maintained by a dedicated community of global mappers making OSM a natural choice for Facebook.
Every day, OSM receives millions of contributions from the community. Some of these contributions may have intentional and unintentional edits that are incompatible with our use cases. Our mapping teams work to scrub these contributions for consistency and quality. In the course of this work, we also build additional tools and technologies on top of OSM.
OSM is a complex data product. Many tools, services, and companies have been created to make it full-featured. We’ve always developed our OSM-related tools with the hope that our approach to keeping maps current and accurate for our own use cases may also benefit others in the OSM community. To that end, we’re pleased to announce the release of the Daylight Map Distribution, one of our internal OSM datasets scrubbed to meet the quality standards of our wide-ranging products.
What’s Included in the Daylight Map Distribution:
We use maps made with OSM across Facebook to show people, events, and places:
Intentional, and possibly malicious edits range from headline-grabbing hate speech to outdated names. Some examples include:
Other bad edits include geometry errors and small instances of grafitti. Here are some samples of minor and unintentional bad edits:
OSM forms a critical part of how our users interact with the world around them and our hope is that this release will make it easier for others to benefit from our work ensuring that it’s appropriate for display and free of vandalism. Through our use of OSM, we’ve encountered a variety of issues and inconsistencies and we’ve included fixes in our release of the Daylight Distribution. We also contribute these fixes back to OSM for the benefit of the larger community.
Our approach toward creating the Daylight Map Distribution was inspired by the success of the Linux operating system: starting with a pair of experts-only floppy disks in early 1991, user demand along with a liberal software license led to an explosion of ”distros,” curated collections of software that could be readily installed by casual users. The first Linux distribution was created less than a year later at the Manchester Computing Centre in February 1992. Today there are hundreds of distros including major products like Red Hat and Ubuntu. Distributors optimize for different uses making it easy and safe to use Linux on servers, laptops, phones, tablets, hardware hacking platforms, virtual machines, distributed systems, and embedded devices.
Consistent with the spirit of OSM, it is our hope that the Daylight Map Distribution (and subsequent iterations) will inspire individuals and companies to release their own datasets under open data licenses as well.
With the Daylight Map Distribution, we also hope to showcase all that is possible with a stable, efficient community-drive mapping effort. Open source is by its nature inclusive and welcoming to all. No contribution is too small or too large and we’re proud to stand together with every OSM contributor as we work toward shared goals of improving OSM and mapping the world.
If you have any questions about this data distribution, we have created a #daylightdistro_feedback Slack channel in OSM US. Members of the team will be there periodically to answer questions. You can also email the team at osm@fb.com.
Learn more about the technology behind our process from our engineering team:
This release is just a sneak peek preview. We plan to start using this version of the data in our public maps soon, but you can start using it today. Download Daylight Map Distribution right now in OpenStreetMap PBF format:
If you’re interested in engineering and other roles working on OpenStreetMap at Facebook, get in touch!