Sourcing and curating high-quality, current, and comprehensive map data is a difficult and expensive process. To solve this problem, the Overture Maps Foundation (Overture) was founded in 2022 by Microsoft, Meta, Amazon, and TomTom to enable current and next-generation interoperable open map services and products.
Early this year, Overture released the beta version of its global open map dataset. After months of beta testing, the company today announced the general availability of several of its global open map datasets. Developers can now start building commercial applications based on the Open Maps Datasets. Since Overture delivers data in a documented schema, developers can use it consistently in their apps and services.
Marc Prioleau, executive director of Overture Maps Foundation, said the following regarding the general availability of the map data:
“The data in this GA release is already powering use cases in local discovery, insurance, and mapping industries, and we expect many more use cases in the coming months from industries ranging from automotive to ride-sharing and more.”
Overture founding members Microsoft and Meta are already using this Overture dataset for maps across their products and services.
The GA release of Overture includes the following data:
- Buildings: Includes 2.3 billion unique building footprints worldwide. It already powers Microsoft’s Bing Maps, Esri’s ArcGIS Living Atlas of the World, and Addresscloud’s insurance service platform, which provides insurers with flood-level risk metrics for individual buildings. Look for more use cases from property management, other risk assessments, economic development, 3D visualization, and more.
- Places of Interest: Offers data on nearly 54 million places worldwide, but will expand as new data is added. More broadly, other members can layer social signals, etc., on top of places for their offerings.
- Divisions: National and regional administrative boundaries translated into over 40 different languages to support international use.
- Base: Contextual layers include land and water data and help complete display maps when needed.
Overture is also working on a new Address theme and Transportation theme data, which will be available in future releases.
Source: Overture