On July 24, Overture put out its first version of the Address Theme. This initial release included open address data for 14 countries for a total of just over 200 million address records. That’s about 10% of the world’s population, so there’s a long way to go…but it is a great start. The Address Theme now joins Overture’s other open datasets which include Transportation, Places, Divisions, Buildings, and Base.
Addresses data visualized with Overture Explore
The data is formatted in the new Overture address schema. Our goal is to put the schema out in public for comment and feedback and to build the necessary processes and tools for releasing a consolidated address data product. This release is considered to be alpha and users should expect changes to the schema before it goes to general availability.
Addresses are one of the fundamental data layers for many maps. The data is primarily owned by government organizations whether at the national, regional, or local level. In the last decade, more of these organizations have been making their data available as open data, allowing its use across many applications, from delivery to local search to ride sharing to spatial analysis. However, aggregating that data from all those sources is a complex and significant problem for anyone wanting to build a global open address dataset.
That task was dramatically simplified for us because of the prior work done by OpenAddresses.io. Not only were most of the world’s open address data sets already indexed on the site, but information on the relevant licenses and, in many cases, the pipelines to regularly update the data were also in place.
We encourage owners of open address data to add their datasets to OpenAddresses.io. This can be a common place where owners can link their data and, through that linking, allow their data to be combined into Overture’s open global dataset. We also encourage making use of permissive open source licenses like Public Domain, CDLA Permissive 2.0, or CC-BY-4.0 (if attribution is required) which greatly simplifies the process of using the data for a wide range of users.
In this first release, we chose to use address data from 14 countries and over 200 million address records. These countries were chosen primarily because they offered national datasets, had open permissive licenses for the data, and represented a cross-section of addresses from around the world. Developing a usable schema that accommodates various addressing formats is hard, and this selection gives Overture a chance to try a schema that we hope can accommodate these variations.
Over the past few months, Overture members, including member company AddressForAll, have made contributions to OpenAddresses.io updating different datasets. We plan to continue doing so. Our goal is to build a single, conflated, global address dataset. This alpha release makes a few corrections to the underlying data such as removing some erroneous points from the Mexico dataset and correcting a few longitude points in the New Zealand dataset. They’re small fixes, but it’s a start. In the future, we plan to improve our coverage and also link addresses to the other Overture themes such as Places, Buildings, Divisions, and the associated transportation segments. Stay tuned!
Connect with us
Join us on Aug 1, from 8-9 am PT, for our live AMA to learn more about the GA release, Address theme, and more. Register here.
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