On July 24, 2024, the Overture Maps Foundation announced general availability (GA) for four global map-data themes: Buildings, Places of Interest, Divisions and Base. The release made those datasets available for commercial mapping and geospatial analysis. Addresses launched alongside them in alpha, while Transportation was still in beta. Overture’s later updates expanded the address and transportation data and introduced GERS identifiers to help connect records across datasets.
What general availability means for Overture Maps
Overture Maps is a shared collection of structured map data, not a consumer navigation app. Its datasets are organized into themes and use a documented schema. Developers can use the data to build or enrich mapping applications and geospatial analyses rather than relying solely on a single map vendor’s underlying data.
A central idea is that map entities can have identifiers that let other datasets refer to them. For example, a business could connect its own information to a place record, or combine road records with external traffic data. That can make data integration easier than trying to match features from separate maps through geometry and other clues.
Which datasets were included in the 2024 GA release?
| Theme | What it represents | Status or scale reported at launch |
|---|---|---|
| Buildings | Building footprints, useful for mapping, property management, risk assessment, insurance and 3D visualization. | GA; Overture reported 2.3 billion building footprints worldwide in its July 2024 announcement. |
| Places | Places of interest, which can support local discovery and enrichment with additional information. | GA; nearly 54 million worldwide in the July 2024 announcement. |
| Divisions | National and regional administrative boundaries. | GA; boundaries were translated into more than 40 languages. |
| Base | Contextual land and water layers used to complete display maps. | GA; a total feature count was not stated in the July 2024 announcement. |
| Addresses | Address records intended to support navigation, logistics and search. | Alpha at launch; more than 200 million addresses across 14 countries, according to Overture’s 2024 announcement. |
| Transportation | Road data for transportation and mapping applications. | Beta in July 2024. Overture later reported GA in December 2024 and 86 million kilometers of roads worldwide in its 2025 retrospective. |
The figures are snapshots tied to the announcements cited, not guaranteed current totals. Overture’s 2025 GERS announcement reported 2.6 billion buildings, 64 million places, nearly 447 million addresses and 321 million road segments carrying GERS IDs. A separate 2025 retrospective reported more than 400 million addresses across 34 countries. Those totals reflect later releases and should not be mistaken for the counts available at the July 2024 GA launch.
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What GERS IDs do
The Global Entity Reference System (GERS) assigns identifiers to individual map entities such as buildings, addresses, road segments and places. An organization can use an identifier as a key to associate its own data with an Overture entity, or to join compatible records across datasets. In practical terms, this can replace some fragile feature-matching work—often called conflation—with a direct join on an identifier.
For example, an analyst might associate a company’s property-risk records with building entities, or connect road segments with a separate traffic dataset. The quality of a join still depends on whether the external records identify the same entities and whether the relevant features are covered; an ID does not guarantee that every outside dataset will have a matching record.
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Overture describes GERS as open, global and entity-based, with the goal of making data enrichment easier and reducing dependence on any one map-data vendor. The foundation’s 2025 announcement reported 321 million road segments with GERS IDs, alongside the building, place and address counts listed above. Those are announcement-era figures, not a promise that every feature in every theme has an identifier.
How teams can access and work with the data
Overture’s 2025 retrospective said releases were available through AWS and Azure, and in Snowflake, Google BigQuery and Databricks for customers of those platforms. These options can suit teams that want to process large datasets in cloud storage or an existing analytics warehouse, rather than first downloading everything to a local computer. The retrospective does not establish that every theme or release is available in every platform in the same way.
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For an implementation, first identify the theme, geographic area and release that meet the application’s needs. Then check Overture’s current documentation for the applicable access method, schema, file format, coverage and licensing terms. The 2025 retrospective identifies cloud and warehouse routes, but does not provide a single current download command or establish exact present-day steps for each service.
Overture reported using GeoParquet and warehouse-hosted datasets in its platform availability summary. Those options are geared toward working with geospatial data at scale; they are not necessarily the simplest starting point for someone who only wants to view a map. Check the current release documentation before building a workflow, since the data, delivery options and coverage can change over time.
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Who has used or incorporated Overture data?
In its GA announcement, Overture named Meta, Microsoft, Esri and TomTom as members incorporating its datasets. In its 2025 retrospective, it described examples including Meta social applications, Microsoft Bing Maps, Esri ArcGIS Living Atlas, TomTom Orbis Maps and Addresscloud insurance workflows. These examples show organizational uses of the data; they do not mean that every product in each company uses every Overture theme.
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GA marked a maturity milestone for the four named themes and signaled that they were ready for broader adoption. It did not mean that all Overture data was GA at that point: Addresses was alpha and Transportation was beta in July 2024. Transportation was subsequently reported as GA in December 2024.
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Nor does GA alone establish that a dataset is complete for a particular city, current enough for a specific use, or licensed for every intended purpose. Before relying on it, assess coverage, update cadence, schema maturity, entity identifiers, licensing and the infrastructure needed to query or download the relevant release. Those details can vary by theme and release, so verify them in Overture’s current documentation.
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