Mapzen

Apr 10, 2020

Shut down in 2018 and revived a year later by the Linux Foundation, the open source mapping platform has a new home with developers under the umbrella of the UCF, which suggests a closer relationship with urban work. (Shutterstock) Proponents of open source tools for government can be reassured that Mapzen , a mapping platform comprising half a dozen projects under license at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has a new home with developers at the Urban Computing Foundation. Launched as a company in 2013, the Mapzen platform has been in a state of flux for the past few years. The company shut down in February 2018 until the Linux Foundation, an open source advocate, took it on a year later. The foundation’s vice president of strategic programs, Mike Dolan, told Government Technology at the time that they were interested in Mapzen in part because much of its user base — more than 70,000 people — kept using the platform even after it was shut down. This week a Linux Foundation  news release said Mapzen will now be hosted and governed by the UCF, an active group within the Linux Foundation which also hosts Kepler.gl , an open source geospatial analysis tool created to build large-scale data sets. The news release described UCF as a forum established in 2019 for building mapping tools for projects that improve mobility, safety, road infrastructure, traffic congestion and energy consumption in connected cities. It summarized Mapzen as a collection of such projects focused on core components of geo platforms. Those projects are: Pelias, a full-text geographic search engine Tangram, a series of libraries for rendering 2-D and 3-D maps Tilezen, a series of libraries to generate vector tiles for global map display Transitland, a community-edited database of transit networks in cities and rural areas around the world Valhalla, a global, multi-modal routing engine for navigation services Who's On First, listing places with a stable identifier and descriptions RELATED