Blog
Aug 6, 2026 |
On the Ground at the 2026 Esri User Conference
The conversations we had at the 2026 Esri User Conference (Esri UC) pointed to something real: more teams across more sectors are reaching for open, standardized spatial data. On the plenary stage, an Esri team member ran Overture Places live in ArcGIS Online - 43 million points rendering in real…
Jul 29, 2026 |
Finding the Front Door: How Zephr is Collaborating with Overture to Teach AI Agents to Understand the World Around Them
Walk down Pearl Street in Boulder, Colorado with Sean Gorman and he'll point out things most people filter out: which storefront signs are actually visible from the sidewalk, which business entrances face the street and which open onto an alley, which coffee shop's awning is the only thing telling it…
Jul 22, 2026 |
From Concept to Prototype: Grounding AI & LLMs with Overture’s Cross-Theme Knowledge Graph
LLMs are good with text and bad with coordinates, so they guess when asked where things are. Overture is testing whether map geometry itself can become the connective layer across data themes, giving AI a verifiable spatial graph to reason over. ORATOR, a prototype built by Overture member Wherobots, (led…
Jul 13, 2026 |
Overture hits 50: Building the Open Foundation for a Connected World
As Overture Maps Foundation grows the ecosystem to 50 members, that milestone is really a story about the people and organizations behind it. From government agencies streamlining how they share local data, to research foundations advancing disaster resilience, to companies grounding AI in real-world places, Overture's members bring a wide…
Jul 2, 2026 |
Notes from the Field: SOTM US 2026 in Madison
My trip to Madison started with chasing the sunset. The city looked magical, with an island splitting the lake in two, and the sky, the clouds, and the lake's reflection each holding a different color. I was mesmerized, but mostly more excited about the event ahead and the chance to…
Jun 30, 2026 |
Keeping Overture Places Fresh with Combined Signals
Maintaining an accurate Places dataset at scale is challenging: Businesses are always changing, with 1 in 4 businesses opening, closing, or relocating each year. This requires a constant supply of fresh data to remain up-to-date. However, fragmented approaches and hesitant sharing have traditionally led to incomplete and outdated location data.…
Jun 10, 2026 |
Inside the 2026 Overture Member Summit: The Road Ahead
In April, 30+ member organizations gathered in Florence for the third annual Overture Maps Foundation Member Summit. Three days, 28 sessions, and the most renewed version of Overture we've felt yet. The room held members who've been with us since the beginning alongside first-time attendees. We connected on the rooftop…
Jun 4, 2026 |
How 10 AI Startups are Grounding AI in the Real World with Overture
Artificial Intelligence is fundamentally transforming how we search, analyze, and build. But as developers push LLMs into more complex enterprise applications, they keep running into a fundamental blind spot: LLMs hallucinate when reasoning about physical space and location. Why? Because while LLM providers scrape the internet for text to pre-train…
May 27, 2026 |
Powering Microsoft Maps with Overture: Faster Releases, Better Data
Microsoft is one of the founding members of Overture, working collaboratively to high-quality, freely available, open map data so everyone can build better maps, faster.
May 21, 2026 |
Improving Overture Places Geolocation and Coverage with Zephr, Mapillary, and the “Places Imagery Task Force”
If you have ever followed a map to a storefront only to end up standing in an empty parking lot, you have experienced the limits of traditional geocoding. Like other commercial and open Point of Interest (POI) datasets, Overture Places has historically relied on standard geocoding approaches - but these…
