New Worldwide Open Map Data

The Overture Maps Foundation has announced its first release of open map data.

This initial release of data includes four 'themes':

• Places - Point of Interest (POI) Data on approximately 59 million places worldwide
• Buildings - building footprint and height data for 785 million buildings worldwide
• Transportation - road network data
• Administrative Boundaries - administrative boundaries for Level 2 (country-level) and Level 4 (first-level subdivisions under the country) worldwide.

Who is the Overture Maps Foundation?

The Overture Maps Foundation was founded in 2022 by Microsoft, Facebook (Meta), Amazon and TomTom. Its aim is to develop reliable, easy-to-use, and interoperable open map data.

For me the key word here is 'reliable'. In OpenStreetMap we already have one of the largest geographic databases, which is also free and open. However because OSM data can be edited by anyone it is open to vandalism. This may be why large corporations (such as Microsoft, Facebook, Amazon and TomTom) want more stable geographic data, which is less likely to cause them embarrassment or lead to difficult legal problems with individual country mapping laws.

How Open is this Open Map Data?

Two of the four Overture Maps Foundation 'themes' are available under a ODbL license and two of the themes are available to use under a CDLA Permissive v 2.0 license.

The type of license to access an Overture Maps Foundation theme I think hints as to where the data was sourced from. The Places and Administrative Boundaries themes are both available under a permissive licence. This suggests that at least some of the geographic data in these themes was sourced from OSM (who require users to in turn offer a permissive license). The Buildings and Transportation themes have a ODbL license and I suspect the data in these themes were sourced from Microsoft, Facebook, Amazon and TomTom (for example Microsoft's AI derived building footprints) and not from OpenStreetMap.

Downloading the Data

The two different types of license will probably not matter too much to most end users. What might be more pertinent to end users at the moment is how open the Overture Map Foundation data is in terms of access. At the moment if you want to access the data you need to use Amazon Athena, Microsoft Synapse, DuckDB or download the database.

Instructions to access the data are available on the Overture Maps Data Repo. It seems like the easiest way to access the data at the moment is to set up an Amazon AWS or Microsoft Azure account (something which I'm personally not too keen on doing). 

Obviously this is a first release. I'm hopeful that in the future the Overture Maps Foundation will develop more user-friendly methods of accessing the data. If not then I'm sure someone else will create a more user friendly interface for accessing the data (for example by providing links to individual country boundary data as individual GeoJSON files). 

Also See

Natural Earth - free vector and raster map data

All The Places - business POI data sourced by scraping company store locators

MapIt - an easy way to download admin boundary data from OpenStreetMap in a variety of formats

Gimme Geodata - a simple to use tool for easily downloading OpenStreetMap boundary data