Smart city and transportation open source organisation the Urban Computing Foundation (UCF) is taking over the mapping platform Mapzen. The platform, which is used by more than 70,000 software developers in connected city, autonomous vehicle and smart infrastructure applications, provides mapping with real-time navigation, localisation, 3D and 2D rendering, transit and full text geographic search. The platform will be hosted and governed from now on by UCF. 

Mapzen was originally created in 2013 and became a Linux Foundation project in January 2019. As a UCF project, it will more directly impact and accelerate the widespread adoption of open source urban computing and support the surrounding ecosystem. It joins existing UCF project Kepler.gl, an open source geospatial analysis tool created to build large-scale data sets.

Mapzen comprises several projects: Pelias, a distributed full-text geographic search engine; Tangram, libraries for rendering 2D & 3D maps with WebGL/OpenGL ES & vector tiles; Tilezen, libraries to generate vector tiles for global map display; Transitland, a community edited data service aggregating transit networks across metropolitan and rural areas around the world; Valhalla, a global, multi-modal routing engine for turn-by-turn navigation services; Who’s on First, a gazetteer or big list of places, each with a stable identifier and descriptive properties.

These projects are all licensed under the MIT license, and supported by developers at companies such as Eventbrite, Foursquare, Mapbox, The World Bank, Snapchat, HERE Technologies and Mapillary. The UCF community includes contributors such as Carto, Facebook, Google, HERE Technologies, IBM, Interline, Sidewalk Labs, StreetCred Labs, Uber and UC San Diego.

“We are extremely excited to welcome the Mapzen family of projects to the Urban Computing Foundation. Mapzen encompasses a half dozen independent projects and communities, collectively developing a truly open platform for mapping, search, navigation, location, and transit data.  Mapzen joining the Urban Computing Foundation represents a great step forward in expanding the ecosystem of open source urban computing software and tools,” said Travis Gorkin, Uber Data Visualisation Lead and Urban Computing Foundation TAC contributor.

“Mapzen is excited to join the Urban Computing Foundation to continue our work on open-source mapping tools alongside other great companies and developers,” said Randy Meech, CEO, StreetCred Labs. “In challenging times for cities everywhere, we believe that making location software and data open and accessible is important work that can help in large and small ways.”

“Under the Mapzen umbrella, Interline has been proud to work together with many organisations and individuals to build a comprehensive stack of open-source software and data for geographic applications. We look forward to further expanding the collaboration with the Urban Computing Foundation, especially for transportation and mobility applications in cities around the world,” said Drew Dara-Abrams, previously Head of Mobility Products at Mapzen, currently Principal at Interline Technologies.