Google leads the market for online maps and charges mobile app developers a tidy fortune for access to its r mapping services.  Apple does something similar for its users, but it is a drop in the bucket compared to Google, and its mapping ability could be better.

The new alliance wants to enable companies to build their own maps without relying on Google. Dubbed the  Overture Maps Foundation, the outfit has captured 59 million "points of interest," such as restaurants, landmarks, streets and regional borders. The data has been cleaned and formatted for free as the base layer for a new map application.

OMF executive director Marc Prioleau Meta and Microsoft collected and donated the data to Overture. He said that data on places is often challenging to collect and license, and building map data requires lots of time and staff to gather and clean it.

"We have some companies that, if they wanted to invest in building the map data, they could," Prioleau said. Rather than spending that kind of money companies were asking, can we just get collaboration around the open base map?" Overture aims to establish a baseline for map data so that companies can use it to build and operate their own maps.