The Overture Maps Foundation, a collaboration of companies working on interoperable open map services and products, has announced the General Availability of several of its global open maps datasets.

Overture has Amazon, Meta, Microsoft and TomTom as its steering members, Esri as a general member, and most of the companies in the mapping and GIS sector as contributor members.

Mapping service and application providers can use Overture's open data for visual maps and spatial analysis. The data is delivered in a documented schema, and developers can attach other spatial data to the entities in the base map via a unique identifier, so the Overture data acts as a common, shared backbone for an expanding catalog of linked data. Overture members, including Meta, Microsoft, Esri, and TomTom, are already incorporating Overture datasets into services and products.

This release includes five base layers which have been assembled from the best available open data sources, formatted in the Overture schema and assigned GERS IDs - places of interest, buildings, transportation, administrative boundaries, and a base layer. There's also an alpha version of a new address theme.

Places of Interest is made up of data on 54 million places worldwide that can be used to build map based local discovery tools.  The Buildings element consists of 2.3 billion unique building footprints worldwide, and developers can add their data on top of the building information. This data already powers Microsoft's Bing Maps, Esri's ArcGIS Living Atlas of the World, and Addresscloud's insurance service platform, which provides insurers flood-level risk metrics for individual buildings.

Transportation (which is still a beta release) shows worldwide networks of roads, footpaths and other travel infrastructure in a normalized schema. It is expected to move to GA within a few months, when Overture says improvements will include more detailed and accurate data from aerial imagery, clearer road routes with recognizable highway signs, comprehensive rail and ferry route data, and better handling of complex traffic rules and restrictions.

The other elements of this release are Administrative Boundaries which shows national and regional administrative boundaries, including regional names translated into 40 different languages to support international use; and the base data includes land and water data to help complete display maps when needed.

Alongside this release, Overture also made an alpha release of a new Address theme that includes 14 countries with over 200 million addresses. The alpha release has been made so the public can see the proposed schema and give feedback to ensure it can work across a worldwide set of address data. Overture says that while companies access address data from a multitude of open data sources, those sources often have different licenses, formats, and schemas. Once in Overture, the addresses will also have unique identifiers to enable rapid attachment of outside data.

Along with address data, Overture is adding visualization tools to make the dataset easier to explore and download.

More Information

Overture Maps Foundation

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