Frequently Asked Questions

The world is vast and ever-changing, making it difficult to maintain accurate, up-to-date maps, especially in rural and underdeveloped areas. Fragmented and inconsistent map data from various companies and government agencies had made it challenging to create a unified, interoperable system. As a result, it became clear that collaboration across industries was essential to pool resources to produce better, interoperable map data faster. Overture Maps Foundation was established as a collaborative effort to solve these challenges. Check out our press release for more details on why and how the foundation was formed.

Overture focuses on creating unified data themes.By combining the best available open data from various sources. It also pioneers the Global Entity Reference System (GERS), which assigns unique identifiers to real-world entities, making it easier to link and integrate data from different platforms. This effort seeks to standardize map data, ensuring it’s interoperable and easy to use for developers across different industries.

Overture Maps provides comprehensive open datasets across multiple themes. These include:

• Addresses: Global address points to support logistics and geocoding.
• Base: Infrastructure, land cover, land use, and water features.
• Buildings: Over 2 billion building footprints worldwide.
• Divisions: Administrative boundaries, from countries to neighborhoods.
• Places: Points of interest (POIs) and landmarks.
• Transportation: Roads, paths, and networks, still evolving as we refine data accuracy further

To support next-generation map products, Overture will steadily improve the coverage, resolution and accuracy of existing data. In addition, Overture will introduce new layers as the community prioritizes them.

Overture and OpenStreetMap are complementary parts of the open map data ecosystem. 

OSM is a worldwide community of mappers that creates open map data based on local concerns, humanitarian needs, and personal interests. Since its founding in 2004, the OSM community has created worldwide map data and an ecosystem of tools that support the editing and maintenance of that data. The OSM community is supported by the OpenStreetMap Foundation. Interested people are encouraged to learn more about OSM and support its valuable work. 

Overture Maps Foundation is focused on the end user requirements for open map data.  Overture uses OSM data along with over 200 other open data sources to produce new open map data sets, formatted in a documented schema and supporting Overture’s Global Entity Reference System (GERS), an open stable ID that can be used to associate data to the underlying Overture data sets.  Overture data will be available for use by the OpenStreetMap community under compatible open data licenses. Many Overture members are also corporate sponsors of OSMF and users of OSM data.

Overture Maps provides comprehensive open datasets across multiple themes. These include:

• Addresses: Global address points to support logistics and geocoding.
• Base: Infrastructure, land cover, land use, and water features.
• Buildings: Over 2 billion building footprints worldwide.
• Divisions: Administrative boundaries, from countries to neighborhoods.
• Places: Points of interest (POIs) and landmarks.
• Transportation: Roads, paths, and networks, still evolving as we refine data accuracy further

To support next-generation map products, Overture will steadily improve the coverage, resolution and accuracy of existing data. In addition, Overture will introduce new layers as the community prioritizes them.

Overture prefers permissive open licenses and will use the Community Database License Agreement – Permissive v2 (CDLA) whenever possible. However, we incorporate open data from many different sources, some of which carry different licenses and different requirements.  The list of data sources and the applicable licenses are shown by theme on the attribution page.  

Several Overture data themes carry the Open Database License v1.0 (ODbL). These themes use data from OpenStreetMap and constitute a “Derivative Database” as defined under ODbL v1.0. Users should reference the ODbL license and applicable community guidelines published by the OpenStreetMap Foundation to understand requirements. 

Overture considers (A) any maps or outcomes obtained by computational analysis that are created using Overture data licensed under CDLA Permissive v 2.0, or (B) the supplementing of (1) a Data Recipient’s content or (2) a third-party’s data – in either case, obtained through computational analysis – with CDLA Permissive v.2-licensed data from Overture, to be “Results” and according to Section 3, not subject to the requirement to provide the text of the license.

Overture is primarily an open data project and all resulting data products will be licensed under open licenses and made publicly available. See the note above for more information.

In the course of building open data, the Overture project will also create source code as part of our processes . This source code will also carry open source licenses (typically MIT).  Overture has already released tooling under open source licenses to help developers access and use  Overture data. These tools are  available on GitHub. In the future, we may release more open source projects.

Ensuring map accuracy is an ongoing development process. The world is not static, and changes happen every minute. Each of the released data themes has distinct quality processes ranging from logical quality checks to cross-checks across multiple data sets.

However, Overture’s underlying quality philosophy is that map data quality improves as map services built on this data are deployed to more users who, in turn, provide feedback on the accuracy and completeness of the data. For instance, if a business in the dataset goes away, map users who are directed to that business will notice and say that this place no longer exists. Delivery companies that send goods to that business will also notice. Social media posts would go away.

By aggregating these types of signals across many platforms, Overture can build robust pipelines that update the data as the world changes.

Overture produces open data sets that conflate open map data from many sources. These are valuable sources of data and provide coverage and richness that would be impossible to attain otherwise. Overture gratefully acknowledges the work of these organizations in building, aggregating and organizing open map data. See here for more details on our open data sources & partners.

Overture ensures data quality by focusing on two key areas: Measurement and Quality Assurance (QA). Measurement establishes benchmarks and product-level targets to define and track what high-quality data looks like across themes, using tools to monitor metrics like coverage, duplication, and attribute quality. Meanwhile, QA focuses on detecting, resolving, and preventing data issues through a combination of automated validation, mitigation workflows, and feedback loops. These efforts are grounded in Overture’s core principles: building trust through transparency, adopting an automation-first mindset, favoring adjudication over editing, ensuring everything is tagged for traceability, and maintaining strong feedback loops to support continuous improvement. Together, these approaches create a scalable, transparent system that delivers reliable, high-quality data.

For organizations:

Consider joining Overture as a member. We have four tiers of membership that are aimed at any size company, non-profit, government agency or other organization. As a member, your organization can help define the direction of the project and contribute your data directly to Overture. Learn more about our membership.

Email us at info@overturemaps.org if you’re interested in contributing open data, or if you have questions or concerns.

For individuals:

We invite you to explore and contribute to our work that is publicly available on Github. 

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