Overture Maps

The Overture Maps Foundation publishes open map data of the whole world, built by combining data from its member companies, government and other authoritative sources, and open data communities.¹ It launched in December 2022.² Membership is open to companies, non-profits and government agencies, and engineers from them lead its two working groups, on map data and on the schema; its steering committee includes AWS, TomTom and Microsoft.^2,3 The foundation is a Joint Development Foundation project, an affiliate of the Linux Foundation.¹

The data come in six themes.⁵ Buildings are footprints and building parts, over two billion of them by the foundation's count.^3,5 Places are points of interest, and addresses are address points.^3,5 Transportation is road and path segments and the connectors that join them.^3,5 Divisions are administrative areas and boundaries from countries down to neighbourhoods.³ The base theme holds infrastructure, land, land cover, land use, water and bathymetry.⁵ The FAQ says the foundation uses OpenStreetMap along with over 200 other open data sources.³ Buildings, for example, combine OpenStreetMap with Esri Community Maps, Microsoft's Global ML Building Footprints, Google Open Buildings and others, and places come from Meta, Microsoft, Foursquare, AllThePlaces and a number of other companies.⁶

Each feature that Overture matches across sources gets an ID in its Global Entity Reference System (GERS), a random identifier with a commitment to keep it stable from release to release.⁸ Someone who matches their own data to Overture features once can then join on the ID instead of redoing a spatial match after every release.⁸ A registry records when each ID was first seen, last seen and last changed, and a changelog reports what changed per feature between releases.⁸ Buildings, divisions, places and transportation segments and connectors carry GERS IDs; base-theme features and building parts do not.⁸

Data are released monthly, and have been since October 2023; the release of 21 October 2026 was current when read.⁷ Major schema changes happen only in March, June, September and December.⁷ Each release is a set of GeoParquet files in Amazon S3 and Microsoft Azure, read in place with no server or API in between, plus PMTiles vector tiles and a STAC catalogue that names the latest release.⁵ The Explorer website shows the data with no installation or account and downloads what is on screen as GeoJSON; the Python client and DuckDB read from the cloud and transfer only the data inside a chosen area.^4,5 Mirrors exist on BigQuery, Databricks, Fused, Snowflake and Wherobots, and the data are in Esri's ArcGIS Living Atlas.⁹ To comply with data protection rules, including the GDPR right to be forgotten, releases stay in the public buckets for at most 60 days.⁷

Licences differ by theme. Base, buildings, divisions and transportation carry the Open Database License (ODbL) because they are derived from OpenStreetMap.^3,6 Most places data use the Community Data License Agreement Permissive 2.0.^3,6 Addresses come from national and regional sources under open licences, some of which ask for their own attribution.⁶ The suggested citation is "Overture Maps Foundation, overturemaps.org", with the date accessed.⁶

For someone modelling a city or region, Overture gives building footprints, places, roads, land use and boundaries in one schema for anywhere in the world, as files that can be cut to a study area with a single query. The stable IDs let a model's own records, such as surveyed building heights or business data, stay attached to the same buildings and roads across later releases.