The founders said that the founding of the Open-LR Association signals to service providers, automotive OEMs and suppliers that the OpenLR referencing method will continue to be maintained, and remain accessible, free of charge, to the market in the long term.

OpenLR is an open standard for procedures and formats for the encoding, transmission, and decoding of local data irrespective of the map. The format allows locations that are localized on one map to be found on another map to which the data have been transferred. Dynamic location referencing is particularly important for providing high-quality traffic information in densely populated conurbations, and in rural areas. It will also play an important role in the exchange of local information between different partners, and for future automated driving applications.

TomTom launched the open source software project OpenLR in September 2009. OpenLR was designed for the use case of transferring traffic information from a center to in-vehicle systems, built-in or used as an add-on. The information transferred can consist of the current traffic situation at a certain location, a traffic forecast or special alerts. The corresponding locations are roads or a list of connected roads.