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Sunsetting Daylight

May 3rd, 2024

In 2020, Meta began publishing the Daylight Map Distribution. Daylight was the result of an internal project to build an up-to-date and global basemap that could power many map surfaces on Meta products. It originally consisted of 100% OpenStreetMap (OSM) data and over time we incorporated additional open datasets such as ML buildings, LiDAR-derived 3D building heights, additional place name translations, a global landcover layer, urban areas, and more. This global dataset serves our own maps at Meta and has been publicly available for others to download and use.

In late 2022 Meta joined forces with other industry players to form the Overture Maps Foundation with the mission to build reliable, easy-to-use, and interoperable open map data. As a founding member of Overture, we’ve been deeply involved in developing the processes that produce Overture’s published data. In fact, the very same validation processes and pipelines that are used in Daylight are also now used to produce Overture’s regular data releases. Now that Overture has become production ready, with a beta release announced in April and production releases coming soon, Meta will be switching our basemap over to use Overture data. As a result, we’ve made the decision to stop publishing the Daylight Map data products, including the planet PBF and associated sidecar files. Meta will continue to contribute open map data via Overture and we see this as a natural evolution of our open map data strategy. We are working closely with Overture to continue Daylight’s QA processes into Overture’s data releases.

While the sidecar files will no longer be published separately, most of this data is available via Overture or other open data efforts:

• ML buildings we distributed as a separate OSC file are now fully included in each Overture release. You can distinguish ML buildings from OSM or other buildings by inspecting the “sources” field in every Overture record.
• Coastline water/land polygons were published as separate shapefiles. In Overture, the coastline water polygons are included natively in the data alongside the other water features. Coastline water polygons are included in the “base” theme, labeled as the “ocean” class. The inverse polygons, continental land, are included in base and specified as “land”.
• Daylight also added additional translated names for many administrative area features. These are also part of Overture’s “divisions” theme that captures administrative and other types of boundaries. Overture does not directly include ML roads but they will remain available for inclusion into OpenStreetMap via our RapiD editor.

We know there are organizations that rely on Daylight to power their production maps and services and to make this transition easier, we are committed to publishing Daylight for another 6 months. We will stop publishing new Daylight releases in November of 2024. Daylight version 1.58 will be the final Daylight version published. Organizations may explore using Overture data and transitioning their current systems starting now.

For examples and more details on using Overture Maps data, please take a look at the documentation. For any specific help or other questions, please reach out in the data discussions page.