Foursquare is open sourcing its locations database.

a foundational open data set, Foursquare Open Source Places (“FSQ OS Places”). This base layer of 100mm+ global places of interest (“POI”) includes 22 core attributes (see schema here) that will be updated monthly and available for commercial use under the Apache 2.0 license framework.

Maps will be a foundational OS of the future (haven’t they always been though?), so this data set could be a big deal (and could place Foursquare at the center of it).

Could this spark an ImageNet moment for geospatial computing?