One of the leading global providers of location data and platform services Here Technologies has announced the general availability of XYZ, a cloud-based service that provides software developers or other users with the tools needed for effortless map publication and data management.
The XYZ service has been created to make mapmaking and geospatial data management easy for experienced software developers, as well as novice non-coders and professional mapmakers alike. The system has multiple uses, from helping a city manage its infrastructure, allowing an enterprise to optimize its assets, to transit location services and applications to guide drivers to their destination safely.
Here XYZ aims to maximize ease of use, flexibility and interoperability by making use of the best of the open source ecosystem and tools from the company’s long history of building standard and high-definition (HD) maps at a global scale. This approach allows developers to maintain their workflow while incorporating XYZ to address the challenge of managing large and unwieldy geospatial datasets.
Data journalists, cartographers and geospatial data providers will find the real-time nature of Here XYZ’s dynamic tiling capability to be indispensable for publishing maps that require live updates. The XYZ service is included as part of the market-leading Here Freemium developer plan, offering users generous entitlements for data transfer and database storage, and seamless integration of Here Location Services APIs, such as geocoding, routing, search and more to build full-featured, location-aware applications.
Developers can invoke the XYZ Hub API directly or via the Here Command Line Interface (Here CLI). Non-developers can use XYZ Studio to invoke the same XYZ Hub API, but via an intuitive web application. Here says it will continue to evolve XYZ in response to developer and user feedback, GitHub pull requests for the Here CLI and QGIS plug-in, and needs articulated by leading providers of public datasets.
“Our XYZ service is about flipping the fundamental challenge of mapmaking on its head,” said Achal Prabhakar, vice president of engineering at Here Technologies. “We’ve built the largest SD and HD mapping platform in the world and we know that 80% of mapmaking is time spent wrangling and managing geospatial data. XYZ solves this problem by delivering the pre-requisite building blocks for data management and map publishing, so users of all levels can focus on creating the insights and context that only the concept of location can provide.”
For Interline Technologies, a San Francisco-based startup that improves transportation networks digitally, the Here XYZ Hub API is accessed via a custom ‘connector’ that enables push updates for live datasets. Drew Dara-Abrams, principal at Interline, commented, “Here XYZ is a great addition to our toolkit for our team and for our users. The command-line interface has become part of our regular workflows for visualizing and inspecting our work-in-progress and other miscellaneous geodata. XYZ Connectors are opening even more interesting possibilities for our production systems and real-time data updates. They’re a powerful hybrid of managed-cloud services, open-source components, and common data formats like GeoJSON and GeoJSONL.”
