Open, flexible, built for business: What makes TomTom Orbis Maps so alluring for location tech

TomTom released its Orbis Maps into the wild last year, and it is now being applied to more and more use cases every week. Gone are the days of complex, hard-to-use maps and non-scalable open data, Orbis Maps is flexible and versatile, built on a common foundation and open standard. We spoke with Mike Schoofs, TomTom’s Chief Revenue Officer, and Ana Lira, VP of Engineering, to find out why companies are choosing Orbis Maps and what makes it so versatile.

Watch Mike Schoofs, TomTom’s Chief Revenue Officer, explain why the likes of Microsoft choose TomTom Orbis Maps

Location technologies are used in all kinds of applications, there are the obvious ones like navigation and traffic management, but there are less obvious ones too. For example, did you know Microsoft uses TomTom location data in its business analytics software, Power BI, and its productivity suite, Microsoft 365?

Becoming the obvious choice

From office productivity, to business analytics, to the public sector, to logistics operations, to ride hailing — TomTom Orbis Maps is a key part of many applications.

Microsoft is just one of the many organizations using TomTom Orbis Maps and integrating it into its products and services. As Schoofs explains, TomTom Orbis is finding itself popular in many, starkly different applications and use cases.

TomTom Orbis Maps is being adopted across various industries, thanks to its versatility. Its architecture, how it’s built and how it’s supported by TomTom, all make it easy to use and interoperable with other mapping and location tech.

As Schoofs puts it, “We do the heavy lifting of mapping, so our partners can focus on their core business and what makes them unique.”

The tech behind the heavy lifting

TomTom Orbis Maps’ versatility is the result of several technologies and strategic decisions uniting to create a powerful, paradox-breaking digital map and location tech platform. One that can easily support any use case and is primed for future, unimagined use cases.

Ana Lira, VP of Engineering, explains that there are two key things that make TomTom Orbis Maps this versatile: its open standard and the Global Entity Referencing System (GERS). These two things have not been seen together in a commercial grade, enterprise-ready map and location tech platform before and they are a powerful combination.

Ana Lira is TomTom"s VP Engineering focusing on building the technical frameworks behind TomTom Orbis Maps.

“Traditionally maps have lacked an open standard. They’re all good and high quality, but they’re proprietary which makes them challenging and hard to work with. And it’s difficult as a map customer to adopt those technologies without many downsides, like vendor lock-in,” Ana says.

Vendor lock-in is an often overlooked dynamic.

Public consumers embrace entire ecosystems without issue, but in the B2B world it can stifle innovation, raise costs, and reduce efficiency. Companies become dependent on vendors' priorities for feature development, and it potentially costs millions in resources and slowed production.

With proprietary maps, customers don’t have much control over what’s mapped and in what detail. If they want to add custom data, they typically do so in a private layer, which locks that data away for their own use. Then the customer(s) will have to gather, format and integrate the data with the rest of its stack. It’s a mountain of work. If they migrate to another platform, they might not be able to take their data with them. If they want to add more data and features, they’ll face another mountain of work.

“This is what TomTom Orbis Maps is changing,” Ana adds.

A powerful open standard

“TomTom Orbis Maps is built using an open standard, similar to the standard of OpenStreetMap — we use the PBF file format, for example. We take all our own proprietary data, now compatible with the open standard, add it to masses of open data, validate it and get it enterprise ready,” Ana adds. With this, Orbis Maps offers all the benefits and flexibility of an open data platform with none of the commercial drawbacks.

Built on an open standard, TomTom Orbis Maps blends mountains of data to create beautiful visual maps.

Open map data and open mapping standards open doors for anyone that wants to build with maps, but they’re not without their shortcomings. The industry needs TomTom’s hybrid commercial solution.

Open data is vulnerable to vandalism and hacks, and open platforms often prioritize data gathering and map creation over map consumption. TomTom Orbis resolves these issues, by validating and standardizing data and consumption to, as Ana Lira puts it, “Make the map enterprise ready.”

In a way, open data and their associated platforms generate data, and TomTom Orbis Maps enables businesses to consume it — one is the farm growing the ingredients, the other is the kitchen preparing, plating and serving them to customers.

Consistently stable over time, no hidden catches

Open standards are great when it comes to sourcing, sharing and working with data, but for a map to be truly valuable commercially, it needs to be stable over time. There’s no point in using open data if it breaks your map every time it’s updated, because it gets updated a lot!

Indeed, data can be built and shared using common standards and file formats, but if the way it’s cataloged at a base level isn’t also designed with long-term commercial scalability in mind, it’ll fall short of being as versatile as it can be, Ana explains.

For that, Ana explains, TomTom Orbis Maps uses its own stable ID system.

Open projects, like OSM, do have their own ID references systems, but these are not designed for commercial applications. With OSM’s ID policy, changing an attribute on a complex map feature like a road also changes the ID, making it impossible to mix attributes of the same type on a map section.

This approach is useful for tracking version histories and maintaining detail too, but unexpected ID changes can break commercial mapping systems. It also creates more IDs over time, which adds significant computational demand on apps that consume map data — over time, the map gets more and more resource intensive to run.

With the GERS ID system, when attributes change along a segment of road, for example the speed limit, it changes that attribute only. It doesn't create a new segment and new ID.With other ID systems, when attributes on a section of mapped road change, it requires the road to be resectioned, creating more IDs. Note in this image how each ID is completely unique in its mix of surface, speed and lanes, with this ID system that must always be maintained, which leads to lots of new IDs being created every time an attribute changes.

Now, consider the frequency of changes or additions to maps, and how much of a headache it is to correct multiple IDs just because the map is updated — maps will always need to be updated, so unless we introduce stable IDs maps will always come with a lot of work that could otherwise be avoided.

For that TomTom, as part of the Overture Foundation, developed the GERS ID system.

“With the GERS ID (Global Entity Reference System), every item on the map has a unique ID that will not change,” Ana says. “This is super important for teams of developers working on maps or developing features and tech with maps.”

“It doesn’t matter if we’re working with Meta or AWS and Microsoft, because, as each one of us contributes content to the Overture Map we have a common way to identify items on the map, making it stable over time,” she adds.

[If you want the technical low down on GERs, TomTom’s Engineering team wrote about it on a blog post, read it here.]

Magic between the layers

Once you have this foundation, the task becomes one of how to build and organize location data on top of it.

Ana Lira describes TomTom Orbis Maps as being made of many layers, each of which serves a different “problem space” or use case. This approach essentially packages data into ready-to-use layers for the most common applications, like navigation and routing, search and ADAS. This empowers TomTom’s customers with the freedom, space, time and resources to innovate and build their own differentiated products.

“Search is for those that need to find things on the map. Navigation and routing is for those that need to go from A to B under specific constraints. And we also have autonomous driving and ADAS layers, filled with rich, HD map data,” she says.

Part of Orbis Maps’ versatility is found in these layers — TomTom’s mapping goals are aligned to those of its customers through this. It ensures that what is delivered and prepared for customers of each use case is ready to build on.

“It means our customers and partners don’t need to think about how to combine their logic with everything else on the map, they can focus on the problem they’re solving in the world,” Ana says. Any data that’s critical to their business will be kept private, and anything that isn’t, will be fed back to the map to improve it for all.

Rather than every autonomous vehicle company or carmaker making ADAS map tech from the ground up, they can start with the relevant layer from TomTom Orbis and build from there. Each layer presents a unique foundation, tailored for the specific problem space it’s addressing, not an adaptation of another map that was originally built for a different use case.

It also ensures that users leverage only the necessary map data to minimize processing overhead and cost, and simplify any integration processes.

Commercial mapmaking at scale

There’s a lot more to making a versatile commercial map than just making an open standard and stabilizing data. However, these processes represent some of the most significant changes and newest approaches in the commercial mapping space.

Together they combine to create a map and platform that’s rich, fresh, accurate and easily updated too, getting the most out of the masses of location data available in the world. With the stable IDs and a platform structure designed for modern applications, it really does provide a level of versatility and futureproofing that’s not been seen before in commercial digital maps.