03 August 2023

Announcing Overture Maps POI Beta

Today we are announcing a new (beta) feature: the addition of 60 million Points of Interest from the Overture Maps Foundation.

About Overture Maps

The Overture Maps Foundation is a consortium of large tech companies lead by Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft and TomTom. They recently released their first open data set containing, among other things, nearly 60 million POIs across the globe.

Overture Maps data is derived from a number of sources but appears to come largely from, and is validated by, the large tech companies steering the foundation.

Data is released under the CDLA Permissive v2.0 license, which places few restrictions on how consumers of the data can use it.

POI Data Beta

Here at Geocode Earth we wanted to offer the community and our customers an easy way to explore this new dataset, so our geocoding APIs can now, optionally, return data from Overture Maps.

To avoid any chance of incompatibility during this beta period, all queries to the Geocode Earth API will behave normally unless they include a new parameter to allow results from Overture Maps.

How to use Overture Maps Geocoding

Out of the box, all requests to Geocode Earth behave exactly as they did before:

A query like

https://api.geocode.earth/v1/autocomplete?text=Empire+State+Building

will return results from one of our existing data sources just like before and will NOT return data from Overture Maps.

To see POI data from Overture Maps, use the following query instead:

https://api.geocode.earth/v1/autocomplete?enable_overture=true&text=Empire+State+Building

To see only data from Overture Maps, use a query like the following:

https://api.geocode.earth/v1/autocomplete?enable_overture=true&sources=overture&text=Empire+State+Building

Beyond Beta

The Overture maps dataset is new and there are many people currently evaluating and analyzing this new resource.

At this time, we can’t offer a timeline of when, or even if, Overture Maps data will permanently become part of Geocode Earth services. It could be that it’s a useful new addition, or it could be too redundant or of too low quality to be valuable. We’ll see and we’ll be in close contact with our customers to see what you think.

Building for the community

We’re genuinely excited to see what new abilities Overture Maps data might bring. We’d encourage anyone who needs an autocomplete-friendly search API for POIs to try it out.

During this beta period, we’ll gladly help out any researchers, academics, students, or anyone else looking to test out Overture Maps or build something cool. If you’re working on a project that could use some new POIs to explore, shoot us an email and we’ll send some free usage credits your way.