Geo Week panel discussion on embracing open data and standards

At Geo Week 2025, Matt Collins moderated a panel on a long-standing interest of his: open data. The geospatial industry generates vast amounts of data, yet much of it remains siloed. While data sharing has always played a role, openness has gained significant traction in recent years. This made it a timely topic for discussion, and an esteemed panel of industry leaders provided valuable insights.

The session, entitled 'What Open Data Means for Geospatial Professionals', featured the following panelists:

• Chris Andrews, Cesium (part of Bentley Systems)
• Alex Chu, Google Maps
• Amy Rose, Overture Maps Foundation (OMF)
• Scott Simmons, Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC)

The 90-minute conversation touched on a number of different topics around open data in the industry, with each panelist coming to things from a slightly different perspective. Andrews and Chu, for example, work for public companies that are embracing open data, while Rose works for an organization made up of some of the world’s largest companies – Meta, Microsoft, AWS and TomTom were the founding members of OMF – all coming together to create an open map. Simmons, meanwhile, works for a large consortium that includes companies and organizations from around the world, with the OGC creating standards used throughout the geospatial industry.

Historic perspective

These different perspectives made for an interesting discussion around not only the positives of open data, but also some of the negatives and barriers that come from really embracing an open data ecosystem in the industry. Early on, Andrews shared his view on the evolution of this idea throughout his time in the industry, noting that it hasn’t exactly been a linear line. From his perspective, he saw plenty of open data ideals in the late 20th century, with things closing up a bit post-9/11 before the trend recently starting to shift back towards open.

Andrews talked about his experiences in the 1990s with CDs that were shipped out by Esri as an example of how some of this open data was made available, along with other examples like GIS parcels being shared and GIS data being put out by utility companies. However, he noted that after 9/11 happened, much of that data sharing ceased. Since then, sharing has started to trend up again, and he points to the creation of Google Maps as being an impetus for that trend, along with other technologies.

After establishing some of this history, the conversation turned towards some of the challenges and barriers that come with embracing open data. As noted during the session, it’s great to want to embrace this idea, but it’s not as simple as just flipping a switch. There is some friction involved, and a 100%-open-data world is simply not possible, even in the eyes of the most optimistic.

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