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.

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. 

Keep up to date with Overture by signing up for the community newsletter. 

Overture is a data-centric map project, not a community of individual map editors. Therefore, Overture is intended to be complementary to OSM. Overture will combine OSM with other sources to produce new open map data sets. Overture data will be available for use by the OpenStreetMap community under compatible open data licenses. Overture members are encouraged to contribute to OSM directly, which Esri has been doing for years and will continue to facilitate additional data that is shared with us.

Generally, Overture data is licensed under the Community Database License Agreement – Permissive v2 (CDLA) unless derived from a source that requires publishing under a different license, such as data derived from OpenStreetMap, that constitutes a “Derivative Database” (as defined under ODbL v1.0), which will be licensed under ODbL v1.0.

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 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.

Data quality is managed through automated and manual validation processes. This includes conflation, where multiple datasets—such as those from OpenStreetMap, governments, and AI sources—are merged into a unified, consistent product. Feedback loops and community-driven updates help improve data accuracy over time.