Project Terraforma
Project Terraforma
The Overture Maps Foundation and UC Santa Cruz have launched Project Terraforma, a collaborative research initiative to explore the feasibility of leveraging modern-day foundation models and AI to address the complexities in creating, and maintaining geospatial data at a global scale.
Jan, 2026
Read about one of our Project Terraforma research initiatives on building entrance detection, recently highlighted by Mapillary and Meta.
Project Terraforma, developed by contributors from UCSC, the Overture Maps Foundation, and partner organizations, creates open-source datasets and tools that power high-quality, reusable data pipelines for processing, mapping, navigation, and spatial AI.
Students gain innovation skills through hands-on mapping and spatial computing projects. Working with faculty and industry partners, they address real-world challenges and aim to release open-source code for the broader mapping community.
Biannual summits unite leaders from Overture, its partners, and UC Santa Cruz to align on priorities, review research progress, and refine goals. A structured discovery process helps surface and rank project ideas, while ongoing initiatives are assessed, extended, or concluded.
Graduate students collaborate on industry partner defined problems offering complex, longer-term spatial computing challenges. Projects aim to produce publishable research and open-source tools or datasets.