Overture Maps Foundation

Overture Maps Foundation is a collaborative mapping project that Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, and TomTom launched in 2022 and now run under the Linux Foundation. Instead of surveying the world afresh, it merges open and member-contributed data into clean, standardised layers organised as five themes: places (points of interest like shops, restaurants, and landmarks), buildings, transportation (the road and footpath network), divisions (administrative boundaries from country down to locality), and base (land, water, and land-cover features). The places theme alone carries tens of millions of points of interest globally, and every feature is stamped with a Global Entity Reference System (GERS) identifier, a persistent ID that lets you track the same real-world thing across the monthly releases and join it to your own records.

Everything ships as GeoParquet, a columnar file format built for fast analytical queries. You do not have to download the whole planet: the files sit in public buckets on AWS and Azure, so the quickest start is to point DuckDB or Apache Spark at them and filter by theme and bounding box to pull just your region. To turn this into a retrieval corpus, select the columns that carry meaning (name, category, address, and coordinates), stitch each feature into a short natural-language passage, and embed those passages so a model can answer questions about specific places.

That makes Overture a strong backbone for anything grounded in the physical world: a local-search or concierge assistant, a travel planner, a logistics or store-locator tool, or a knowledge base of businesses and landmarks. Because the schema is uniform and the sources are already reconciled, you skip the painful job of merging clashing geographic datasets yourself.

The licence needs attention. Overture splits its themes between ODbL 1.0 and the more permissive CDLA Permissive 2.0. Commercial use is allowed under both, but ODbL is share-alike: if you publish a derived database built from those themes, you must license it under the same terms and credit the sources, so record which theme every feature came from.

OpenStreetMap is the community-edited source that feeds much of this, and Overture is the harmonised layer built on top. For lightweight place names and administrative hierarchies, GeoNames is a lean companion.