The 2026-09-23.0 release of Overture data and v2.0.0 of the Overture schema are now available. This is a major schema release: the deprecated categories property has been removed from the places theme in favor of taxonomy. Places grew 10.6% to 81.5 million features, as BrightQuery coverage expanded into Germany, Italy, Denmark, and Canada.

You can access the datasets, changelog, GERS registry, bridge files, and PMTiles on AWS and Azure at the paths listed below.

Breaking Changes​

• categories (places): removed the categories property entirely, including categories.primary and categories.alternate. Use taxonomy (taxonomy.primary, taxonomy.hierarchy, taxonomy.alternates) or basic_category instead.
• sources (addresses): added provider, resource, and version fields to the sources struct, and renamed source dataset labels to a provider/resource form.

Getting the data and release artifacts​

You can access this month's data and release artifacts by following the process outlined in our docs. We encourage you to ask questions and provide feedback on the Overture Maps Discussion forum on GitHub. You can also file issues and report bugs in our data and schema repositories. If you have a suggestion for a new dataset or if you have data you'd like to contribute to Overture, you can email us at community@overturemaps.org. We'd love to hear from you.

Release data​

Microsoft Azure:

https://overturemapswestus2.blob.core.windows.net/release/2026-09-23.0/

Amazon S3:

s3://overturemaps-us-west-2/release/2026-09-23.0/

Data changelog​

Microsoft Azure:

https://overturemapswestus2.blob.core.windows.net/changelog/2026-09-23.0/

Amazon S3:

s3://overturemaps-us-west-2/changelog/2026-09-23.0/

Bridge files​

Microsoft Azure:

https://overturemapswestus2.blob.core.windows.net/bridgefiles/2026-09-23.0/

Amazon S3:

s3://overturemaps-us-west-2/bridgefiles/2026-09-23.0/

GERS registry​

Microsoft Azure:

https://overturemapswestus2.blob.core.windows.net/registry/

Amazon S3:

s3://overturemaps-us-west-2/registry/

PMTiles​

Amazon S3:

s3://overturemaps-extras-us-west-2/tiles/2026-09-23.0/

Theme-specific updates​

Addresses​

• Address count grew from 472,797,160 to 474,186,531, an increase of 0.29%.
• Ingested new regional datasets for New Caledonia (NC, 41,536 addresses) and French Polynesia (PF, 2,000 addresses), added new data sources for three counties in Taiwan and the City of New Orleans.
• Refreshed data in Italy; gained roughly 1M new addresses and improved location precision.
• Enriched the sources struct with provider, resource, and version fields, and renamed source dataset labels to a provider/resource form. The number of distinct source labels rose from 190 to 431 as a result. This is a labeling and provenance change; it does not by itself add or remove addresses.
• Source provenance coverage improved substantially: sources[0].record_id rose from 0.12% to 100%, sources[0].update_time from 0% to 100%, and sources[0].license from 0% to 100%.
• Core field coverage is stable or slightly improved: street 98.34% to 98.52%, number 92.62% to 92.78%, and address_levels_2 74.71% to 76.11%.

Base​

• OSM Cut-Off Date: 2026-09-12

• Feature counts by type:

• Bathymetry grew from 59,963 to 407,277 features, sourced from ETOPO and GLOBathy. The growth reflects the deeper-than coverage model, in which a feature at depth = d covers all water deeper than d meters and levels nest.
• 100% GERS churn across the infrastructure, land, land_use, water, and bathymetry types, caused by a change in how UUIDs are generated for the theme.

Buildings​

• OSM Cut-Off Date: 2026-09-12

• Building count grew from 2,529,582,613 to 2,533,842,612, an increase of 0.17%. Building parts grew from 4,339,150 to 4,486,107, an increase of 3.39%.

• Introduced a shelter class, which now carries roughly 321,000 features across the civic, outbuilding, transportation, residential, and other subtypes. Unclassed civic buildings fell 44.3%, from 572,100 to 318,412, as those features were reclassified.

Divisions​

• OSM Cut-Off Date: 2026-09-16

• Feature counts by type:

• GERS churn is low across all three types, at 1.13% for division, 1.29% for division_area, and 0.38% for division_boundary.
• Made mostly minor, incremental changes to the theme this month.

Places​

Places grew 10.6% this release, driven by the expansion of BrightQuery coverage beyond the United States.

• Removed the deprecated categories property in favor of taxonomy and basic_category.
• Place count grew from 73,631,092 to 81,455,425, an increase of 10.63%.
• Expanded BrightQuery from United States-only coverage to coverage in the United States, Germany, Italy, and Denmark. Added additional US places under the services_and_business category. BrightQuery places grew from 2,289,171 to 10,255,071, an increase of 348%.
• Operating status coverage improved: places marked open grew 66.2%, from 11,047,288 to 18,361,914.

BrightQuery place density, August vs. September: new coverage appears across Germany, Denmark, and Italy.

Transportation​

• OSM Cut-Off Date: 2026-09-09

Change Summary​

Count Changes​

Length Changes​

• GERS churn is low, at 0.85% for connectors and 0.94% for segments.

Schema changelog​

The changelog for Overture schema v2.0.0 is here.

Attribution​

You'll find information about attribution and licensing here.

Try it out:

pip install overture-schema

>>> from overture.schema.places import Place
>>> sorted(Place.model_fields)

['addresses', 'basic_category', 'bbox', 'brand', 'confidence', 'emails', 'geometry', 'id', 'names', 'operating_status', 'phones', 'socials', 'sources', 'taxonomy', 'theme', 'type', 'version', 'websites']

>>> print(Place.model_fields["taxonomy"].description)

A structured representation of the place's category within the Overture taxonomy.
Provides the primary classification, full hierarchy path, and alternate categories.

You can ask a feature type what fields it has, read the documentation for anything, and validate your own data against a feature type or model. You can do that from the Python interpreter, your favorite IDE with type hints and completion, or at scale within a Spark job.

For some of you, our migration to Pydantic isn't a big deal. Maybe you'll notice that we made a few correctness fixes to the schema structure and improved our documentation. For others, this is a huge and welcome change. The schema has gone from a document you read to code you can build with.

Install and generate what you need​

The overture-schema package is the umbrella: install it to get all six themes and the schema tooling. Twelve packages sit underneath it, versioned and released together but split so each can change independently and be reused on its own.

Each schema package registers its feature types through setuptools entry points -- metadata that is exposed on installation. If you only install the buildings theme, overture-schema list-types will show you just the two feature types for buildings instead of all fifteen types across the Overture catalog.

overture-schema list-types

building           feature  overture  overture:theme=buildings
building_part      feature  overture  overture:theme=buildings

We began porting the schema from JSON Schema to Pydantic last August, and since last November we've updated both the Pydantic models and the YAML versions with every release. The new Pydantic models are now the source of truth, and everything else we ship is generated from them: the JSON Schema, the PySpark validation expressions used by Overture’s internal data pipelines, and the reference documentation on this site. They can't drift apart, because they all come from the same place.

Our new code generation engine for Pydantic models has opened significant opportunities. The generated reference docs are simpler than the old docs and carry more detail like field- and model-level constraints and inline example data. The generated PySpark expressions validate modeled data at scale. Best of all, the code generation system can be extended as new use cases emerge from the ecosystem.

The YAML files are deprecated as of this release, and we'll remove them in December 2026. The JSON Schema stays, except now it’s a derived output instead of the source of truth. It’s functionally the same, even if it’s structured differently and published as JSON. You can grab it as a release artifact, or generate it yourself for the subset of types you need:

# One type
overture-schema json-schema --type building > building.schema.json

# One theme
overture-schema json-schema --tag overture:theme=transportation > transportation.schema.json

# Every type you have installed
overture-schema json-schema > overture.schema.json

Programming in JSON is hard​

The schema we replaced dates to early 2023, when the OG member engineers from Amazon, Microsoft, Meta, and TomTom began designing it. "We started with a GeoJSON mental model before choosing a distribution format, and since we were already working with JSON, JSON Schema was the obvious choice," said Seth Fitzsimmons, a software engineer who has been working on the schema from the beginning, first for Amazon and now as an independent consultant.

At first it worked. Then it grew, and maintaining it turned into programming using JSON Schema constructs: $ref for reuse, oneOf for branching, conditional rules layered on top, all in a format meant to describe documents rather than express and verify logic. And we hit some conceptual snags once Overture started shipping data in GeoParquet in late 2023. "The lesson we learned is that JSON Schema is an excellent way to model JSON," said Vic Schappert, a software engineer from Amazon and one of the original architects of the schema. "But it does not generalize well to non-JSON use cases." The new Pydantic-based schema describes GeoJSON and GeoParquet equally well, and should extend just as well to GeoPackages, PostgreSQL tables, Flatgeobufs, Shapefiles, and whatever new geospatial formats tomorrow brings.

The documentation was separate from the schema rather than integrated within it, so it went stale. It used GeoJSON terminology and nesting to describe a GeoParquet dataset, which confused people. And making changes to the schema was difficult and limited to the handful of authors who knew the YAML well. Also, the old schema let things through. For example, every name rule was meant to carry a variant; the JSON Schema required only value, so rules without one validated cleanly. And when validation did fail it failed obscurely: schema.yaml is a single top-level oneOf with one branch per feature type, so a segment missing one variant reported that it had also failed to be an address, a building, a division, and every other type in the schema. The report ran hundreds of lines; the answer was a single line near the bottom.

The same validation with Pydantic reports one error: 1 validation error for segment (road) names.rules.0.variant Field required [type=missing, input_value={'value': 'Main St'}, input_type=dict]

>>> from overture.schema.transportation import RoadSegment
>>> record = {
...     "id": "08f2aa6c5a4a1b3c",
...     "theme": "transportation", "type": "segment", "version": 1,
...     "subtype": "road", "class": "residential",
...     "geometry": {"type": "LineString",
...                  "coordinates": [[-122.68, 45.52], [-122.67, 45.52]]},
...     "connectors": [{"connector_id": "08f2aa6c5a4a0000", "at": 0.0},
...                    {"connector_id": "08f2aa6c5a4a1111", "at": 1.0}],
...     "names": {"primary": "Main Street", "rules": [{"value": "Main St"}]},
... }
>>> RoadSegment.model_validate(record)

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
  File ".../pydantic/main.py", line 732, in model_validate
    return cls.__pydantic_validator__.validate_python(
           ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
pydantic_core._pydantic_core.ValidationError: 1 validation error for segment (road)
names.rules.0.variant
  Field required [type=missing, input_value={'value': 'Main St'}, input_type=dict]
    For further information visit https://errors.pydantic.dev/2.13/v/missing

Extending Pydantic, extending Overture​

We’re truly excited about the work we did to extend Pydantic’s functionality. The validator, the code generator, the documentation generator, and the Spark package all work on any Pydantic model, not just Overture’s.

Two packages carry the essential vocabulary of that system: overture-schema-system holds the base types, including geometry types and the numeric widths Python doesn't distinguish but Parquet, Trino, and PostgreSQL do; overture-schema-common encodes Overture-specific conventions like OvertureFeature, names, sources, scoping.

You can use the first package on its own. Create a subclass from system.feature.Feature directly and you get a Pydantic geographic feature model that understands and serializes GeoJSON geometries and fits into the code generation ecosystem, without any Overture-specific conventions. One model can describe both the GeoJSON document and tabular column layout; you don't write one representation and translate to the other.

Declared types can be re-used across datasets, too. Two datasets that both declare a field as CountryCodeAlpha2 are saying the same thing about it, and a dataset that uses three-letter codes can be reconciled with one that doesn't because both declared a semantic type (which Python even distinguishes) instead of a bare str.

For example, you could create your own “vineyard” feature type as a small Python class plus three lines of TOML:

# mypkg/models.py
from typing import Literal
from overture.schema.common import OvertureFeature
from overture.schema.system.numeric import float32


class Vineyard(OvertureFeature[Literal["agriculture"], Literal["vineyard"]]):
    """A cultivated area planted with grapevines."""

    area_hectares: float32 | None = None

# mypkg/pyproject.toml
[project.entry-points."overture.models"]
vineyard = "mypkg.models:Vineyard"

Install that, and overture-schema list-types shows "vineyard" next to "building" and "place."" You can validate it, generate its reference documentation, and even create a JSON Schema for it.

Our next big milestone is schema extensions. An extension standardizes a set of new schema fields -- opening hours for POIs, capacity for buildings, advisory speeds for roads -- and enables an ecosystem of new data that interoperates with Overture without needing to be hosted by Overture. An extension adds columns to features that already carry a Global Entity Reference System (GERS) ID, so consumers can connect the extension data to the Overture data by joining on the GERS ID.

Read more​

The schema reference documents every feature type property by property, and the theme guides explain what the data means before you write a query against it. The working documentation for the models lives in the schema repo: how to install and use the packages, how to write your own models, the conventions we follow, and the vocabulary we use for all of it.

Talk to us​

We build in the open at github.com/OvertureMaps/schema. File an issue, start a discussion, or write to us at community@overturemaps.org. Tell us what breaks or what you plan to build on top of our new foundation.

And, as always, enjoy the data!

The 2026-08-19.0 release of Overture data and v1.18.0 of the Overture schema are now available. You can access the datasets, changelog, GERS registry, bridge files, and PMTiles on AWS and Azure at the paths listed below.

Deprecations​

The categories property in the places schema has been deprecated and will be removed in the September 2026 release, replaced by the new basic_category and taxonomy properties. All three properties will be available until then to ease the transition for our users. The taxonomy documentation is here.

Getting the data and release artifacts​

You can access this month's data and release artifacts by following the process outlined in our docs. We encourage you to ask questions and provide feedback on the Overture Maps Discussion forum on GitHub. You can also file issues and report bugs in our data and schema repositories. If you have a suggestion for a new dataset or if you have data you'd like to contribute to Overture, you can email us at community@overturemaps.org. We’d love to hear from you.

Release data​

Microsoft Azure:

https://overturemapswestus2.blob.core.windows.net/release/2026-08-19.0/

Amazon S3:

s3://overturemaps-us-west-2/release/2026-08-19.0/

Data changelog​

Microsoft Azure:

https://overturemapswestus2.blob.core.windows.net/changelog/2026-08-19.0/

Amazon S3:

s3://overturemaps-us-west-2/changelog/2026-08-19.0/

Bridge files​

Microsoft Azure:

https://overturemapswestus2.blob.core.windows.net/bridgefiles/2026-08-19.0/

Amazon S3:

s3://overturemaps-us-west-2/bridgefiles/2026-08-19.0/

GERS registry​

Microsoft Azure:

https://overturemapswestus2.blob.core.windows.net/registry/

Amazon S3:

s3://overturemaps-us-west-2/registry/

PMTiles​

Amazon S3:

s3://overturemaps-extras-us-west-2/tiles/2026-08-19.0/

Theme-specific updates​

Addresses​

Highlights:

• Refreshed data inputs from Fresno County, CA and Statistics Canada, with richer attribute completeness.
• LINZ (New Zealand) and ICAR each added several thousand more address points.

Base​

Highlights:

• Transit infrastructure grew: parking, parking_space, bus_stop, stop_position, and bicycle_parking counts are up compared to the July release.
• Mountain landforms grew in every class: peak, ridge, saddle, mountain_range, and volcano.

• Note: the August changelog incorrectly identifies 60,060 bathymetry features as added; this should be 0.

Buildings​

Highlights:

• Microsoft ML Buildings (+13.09M) and OpenStreetMap (+3.81M) both grew in coverage.
• Hundreds of thousands of buildings picked up updated num_floors, height, and roof_shape values.

Divisions​

Highlights:

• Geometry refinements were the top source of updates compared to the July release.
• Reclassified some microhoods to neighborhoods in Vietnam.

Places​

Highlights:

• BrightQuery nearly tripled its US contribution (+175%, +1.46M places); AllThePlaces grew +13.4% (+190,735 places).
• Major taxonomy and category updates for improved clarity.
• operating_status detail improved: 1.64M more places are now flagged with an "open" status.

Transportation​

Output Stats​

Change Summary​

Count Changes

Length Changes

Highlights:

• Improved coverage of road_surface, class, and access_restrictions values.

Schema changelog​

The changelog for Overture schema v1.18.0 is here.

Attribution​

You'll find information about attribution and licensing here.

The 2026-07-22.0 release of Overture data and v1.18.0 of the Overture schema are now available. You can access the datasets, changelog, GERS registry, bridge files, and PMTiles on AWS and Azure at the paths listed below.

Deprecations​

The categories property in the places schema has been deprecated and will be removed in the September 2026 release, replaced by the new basic_category and taxonomy properties. All three properties will be available until then to ease the transition for our users. The taxonomy documentation is here.

Getting the data and release artifacts​

You can access this month's data and release artifacts by following the process outlined in our docs. We encourage you to ask questions and provide feedback on the Overture Maps Discussion forum on GitHub. You can also file issues and report bugs in our data and schema repositories. If you have a suggestion for a new dataset or if you have data you'd like to contribute to Overture, you can email us at community@overturemaps.org. We’d love to hear from you.

Release data​

Microsoft Azure:

https://overturemapswestus2.blob.core.windows.net/release/2026-07-22.0/

Amazon S3:

s3://overturemaps-us-west-2/release/2026-07-22.0/

Data changelog​

Microsoft Azure:

https://overturemapswestus2.blob.core.windows.net/changelog/2026-07-22.0/

Amazon S3:

s3://overturemaps-us-west-2/changelog/2026-07-22.0/

Bridge files​

Microsoft Azure:

https://overturemapswestus2.blob.core.windows.net/bridgefiles/2026-07-22.0/

Amazon S3:

s3://overturemaps-us-west-2/bridgefiles/2026-07-22.0/

GERS registry​

Microsoft Azure:

https://overturemapswestus2.blob.core.windows.net/registry/

Amazon S3:

s3://overturemaps-us-west-2/registry/

PMTiles​

Amazon S3:

s3://overturemaps-extras-us-west-2/tiles/2026-07-22.0/

Theme-specific updates​

Addresses​

• made minor, incremental updates to the data

Base​

• same as previous release, no changes to the data

Buildings​

• made minor, incremental updates to the data

Divisions​

• OSM Cut-Off Date: 2026-07-14

• made minor, incremental updates to the data

Places​

• Introduced three new top level categories for BrightQuery previously filtered out including arts_and_entertainment, lodging, and cultural_and_historic
• Matcher improvements which increased the number of matched places and reduced duplicates

Transportation​

• OSM Cut-Off Date: 2026-07-07

Change Summary​

Count Changes​

Length Changes​

Schema changelog​

The changelog for Overture schema v1.18.0 is here.

Attribution​

You'll find information about attribution and licensing here.

In addition, the Overture Maps project distributes tilesets in the PMTiles format. This doesn't contain any additional data beyond the GeoParquet datasets. The tileset is useful for interactive visualization of Overture features, since geographic objects are clipped to tiles and simplified to many levels of detail. It's used by the Overture Explorer, as well as internal tools.

Overture Maps produces data products and not platforms or APIs, so the PMTiles tileset format lets Overture distribute tilesets using only an S3 bucket. You can find the tilesets powering the Explorer in the overturemaps-extras-us-west-2 bucket.

Data Growth​

As Overture has grown, these tilesets have grown in size and take longer to generate. Prior to the April release, the tilesets for the places and divisions themes were created using the tippecanoe tool.

Tippecanoe is a powerful C++ command line utility for creating tilesets. Tippecanoe's algorithms adaptively create low-zoom tiles by processing all features. This makes it convenient for visualizing data without configuration, but means that the large themes like Places took over one hour to generate.

From the April release onward, tilesets are created with Java code using the planetiler library. Instead of considering all features at each zoom, features are filtered to zoom levels by type. This requires more explicit feature selection, but means tilesets can be generated in a fraction of the time.

Overture Divisions tileset in Overture Explorer

Overture Places tileset in Overture Explorer

Results​

The Places theme tileset creation went from over 2 hours to ~5 minutes. The Divisions tileset creation went from 48 minutes to under 20 minutes.

Because the tilesets require a complete local copy of the GeoParquet data, it's faster to run the tileset generation close to the source buckets on Azure or AWS.

Adopting Terraform/Tofu​

The overture-tiles project was previously using the AWS Cloud Development Kit (CDK) to provision resources for creating tilesets. We switched this project instead to Terraform/Tofu, and host it as a standalone module in the terraform-aws-overture-tiles repository.

This makes tileset creation accessible to the wider Terraform/Tofu audience.

Bring Your Own Data​

Since both the AWS provisioning and the tileset generation code is open source, any developer can use the overture-tiles project as a starting point for creating tilesets from Overture data. Ideas include:

• Making different choices for which themes appear at certain zoom levels
• Creating tilesets for only a specific region
• Integrating private datasets into an Overture tileset with GERS

The Overture Documentation guide on PMTiles has examples for how to modify and run the tileset generation on AWS.

The 2026-06-17.0 release of Overture data and v1.17.0 of the Overture schema are now available. You can access the datasets, changelog, GERS registry, bridge files, and PMTiles on AWS and Azure at the paths listed below.

Deprecations​

The categories property in the places schema has been deprecated and will be removed in the September 2026 release, replaced by the new basic_category and taxonomy properties. All three properties will be available until then to ease the transition for our users. The taxonomy documentation is here.

Getting the data and release artifacts​

You can access this month's data and release artifacts by following the process outlined in our docs. We encourage you to ask questions and provide feedback on the Overture Maps Discussion forum on GitHub. You can also file issues and report bugs in our data and schema repositories. If you have a suggestion for a new dataset or if you have data you'd like to contribute to Overture, you can email us at community@overturemaps.org. We’d love to hear from you.

Release data​

Microsoft Azure:

https://overturemapswestus2.blob.core.windows.net/release/2026-06-17.0/

Amazon S3:

s3://overturemaps-us-west-2/release/2026-06-17.0/

Data changelog​

Microsoft Azure:

https://overturemapswestus2.blob.core.windows.net/changelog/2026-06-17.0/

Amazon S3:

s3://overturemaps-us-west-2/changelog/2026-06-17.0/

Bridge files​

Microsoft Azure:

https://overturemapswestus2.blob.core.windows.net/bridgefiles/2026-06-17.0/

Amazon S3:

s3://overturemaps-us-west-2/bridgefiles/2026-06-17.0/

GERS registry​

Microsoft Azure:

https://overturemapswestus2.blob.core.windows.net/registry/

Amazon S3:

s3://overturemaps-us-west-2/registry/

PMTiles​

Amazon S3:

s3://overturemaps-extras-us-west-2/tiles/2026-06-17.0/

Theme-specific updates​

Addresses​

• made minor, incremental updates to the data

Base​

• made minor, incremental updates to the data

Buildings​

• made minor, incremental updates to the data

Divisions​

• OSM Cut-Off Date: 2026-06-06

• The OSM community has updated boundary tags on relations in Czechia and Slovakia, causing coverage at the locality subtype in Czechia and Slovakia to drop significantly. Many of these features remain as the localadmin subtype.

Places​

• Now filtering out places in locations where a feature's country code is not within that country's boundary. This applies everywhere but is most dramatically visible as a massive reduction in features in the ocean.

Transportation​

• OSM Cut-Off Date: 2026-06-02

Change Summary​

Count Changes​

Length Changes​

Schema changelog​

The changelog for Overture schema v1.17.0 is here.

Attribution​

You'll find information about attribution and licensing here.

OG Overture developers from multiple organizations taking a break from coding for some analog collaboration and documentation, February 2024.

Our contributor base itself is wide. People bring code, documentation, data analysis, quality checks, and more to the project, and they come from an incredibly diverse range of organizations: big tech, scrappy startups, nonprofits, government agencies, and open data communities. This diversity is a strength, giving us a wide range of perspectives and skills. It can also create friction, since these organizations bring different goals, tools, constraints, development velocities, and cultures.

Rather than subjecting our contributors to a strict set of engineering guidelines, we want to communicate a set of higher-level values. These values should be reflected throughout the development cycle, in the documentation we write and the pull requests we post. Beyond giving developers flexibility, this approach is AI-friendly: skills and agents can use this document as broad context for testing intent.

The "Developer Tenets" below are adapted from our internal Overture operations guide. We're publishing them because they're the kind of thing that benefits from being out in the open, where contributors and downstream users can see how we think about building Overture, at least from the engineering side. The tenets were defined by the developers, and Claude helped expand them with examples and code review guidance, i.e. "what to check." That pattern (humans setting direction, AI in a supporting role) is central to how we operate.

Follow the Footsteps of Those Before You​

What it is: Understand and follow how we work as developers within Overture — the architecture we use as scaffolding, how we use GitHub, how we document code, and how we structure pipelines. Before starting work, take time to understand the conventions already in place. Contributions that ignore established patterns create maintenance burden and make code harder to review and debug.

Documentation Beyond Code​

What it is: Code alone is not documentation. Requirements, design documents, test plans, and inline comments for complex business logic are all important parts of a properly-documented change. Documentation is not something added at the end of a project — it should be built out and reviewed during the appropriate development phase. This is especially important for Overture given its collaborative nature and the likelihood of developer turnover. When the next contributor picks up your work, the documentation should tell them what you built, why you built it that way, and how to verify it is working correctly.

What to check: Significant new features or architectural changes submitted without a linked design doc; complex business logic without inline comments explaining the "why"; new DAGs without doc_md populated; PRs that introduce new pipeline behavior without a test plan; documentation that appears to have been added only as a merge prerequisite rather than developed alongside the code.

Invest in Stability​

What it is: Our code needs to be predictable and deterministic. Given a fixed set of inputs, the output should be the same every time. Extra effort should be invested in automation, handling edge and corner cases, full traceability of data through the pipeline, and writing code that is easy to test and verify. Instability in pipeline behavior is one of the most expensive problems at release time — it creates thrashing, difficult debugging sessions, and erodes trust in the data.

What to check: Non-deterministic behavior where results vary across runs without any change in input data; missing handling for null values, empty datasets, or unexpected input shapes; manual steps that could be automated and therefore made repeatable; changes that introduce hard-to-trace side effects on shared state or downstream stages; insufficient test coverage for failure modes and edge cases.

Design for Operations​

What it is: The release operations team is the customer of every pipeline component we write. Code must be designed with its operators in mind — clear, actionable error messages; logging at the appropriate level for debugging; simple and consistent pipeline behavior; and documentation of common failure modes. A pipeline that fails silently or with cryptic errors places a disproportionate burden on the operations team and puts releases at risk.

What to check: New DAGs or task groups with no structured logging on failure; error messages that do not distinguish between configuration errors, data errors, and infrastructure errors; pipeline stages that can fail ambiguously where the error looks the same regardless of root cause; new critical-path components without notes on expected behavior or known failure modes; changes to retry counts, timeouts, or short-circuit logic without documentation explaining the intent.

Our Product is Data; Software is How We Build It​

What it is: Overture's deliverable is high-quality, schema-compliant geospatial data. Code is a means to that end. Thorough testing of a change involves not only unit tests and scalability tests, but also evaluating the impact on the data we output. A technically correct implementation that degrades data coverage, completeness, or schema compliance is not complete. Before a change is considered done, the developer should be able to articulate the expected effect on output data.

What to check: PRs that change pipeline logic without demonstrating impact on output data — feature counts, attribute completeness, schema compliance; schema-affecting changes without a before/after data comparison; matchers or adjudicators updated without benchmarking against known data samples; new pipeline stages merged without running against real data; missing or removed data validation checks.

Balance Cost and Performance​

What it is: Overture has limited resources. Optimization and performance need to be balanced with cost. Developers should be aware of the compute and storage costs their code incurs and should not leave low-hanging fruit on the table. The most common offenders are over-allocated Spark clusters and inefficient algorithms or design patterns that iterate through data unnecessarily.

What to check: Spark jobs with executor counts or memory allocations significantly larger than the data volume warrants; algorithms that perform multiple full dataset scans where a single pass would suffice; iteration over large datasets in Python where a set-based or Spark operation would be appropriate; SQL or Spark transformations that don't take advantage of partitioning or predicate pushdown; patterns that reprocess data that could be cached or reused.

Curious to learn more or get involved? Visit our About pages to meet the staff and member organizations behind Overture. Dive into the docs and contribute to our public projects on GitHub, subscribe to our community newsletter for regular updates, or become a member to help shape the future of open map data infrastructure.

The 2026-05-20.0 release of Overture data and v1.17.0 of the Overture schema are now available. This month we added BrightQuery as a new POI data provider, introducing more than 250,000 new places in the United States. We made minor changes to the schema.

Deprecations​

The categories property in the places schema has been deprecated and will be removed in the September 2026 release, replaced by the new basic_category and taxonomy properties. All three properties will be available until then to ease the transition for our users. The taxonomy documentation is here.

Getting the data and release artifacts​

You can access this month's data and release artifacts by following the process outlined in our docs. We encourage you to ask questions and provide feedback on the Overture Maps Discussion forum on GitHub. You can also file issues and report bugs in our data and schema repositories. If you have a suggestion for a new dataset or if you have data you'd like to contribute to Overture, you can email us at community@overturemaps.org. We’d love to hear from you.

Release data​

Microsoft Azure:

az://overturemapswestus2.blob.core.windows.net/release/2026-05-20.0/

Amazon S3:

s3://overturemaps-us-west-2/release/2026-05-20.0/

Data changelog​

Microsoft Azure:

az://overturemapswestus2.blob.core.windows.net/changelog/2026-05-20.0/

Amazon S3:

s3://overturemaps-us-west-2/changelog/2026-05-20.0/

Bridge files​

Microsoft Azure:

az://overturemapswestus2.blob.core.windows.net/bridgefiles/2026-05-20.0/

Amazon S3:

s3://overturemaps-us-west-2/bridgefiles/2026-05-20.0/

GERS registry​

Microsoft Azure:

az://overturemapswestus2.blob.core.windows.net/registry/

Amazon S3:

s3://overturemaps-us-west-2/registry/

PMTiles​

Amazon S3:

s3://overturemaps-extras-us-west-2/tiles/2026-05-20.0/

Theme-specific updates​

Addresses​

• made minor, incremental updates to the data

Base​

• made minor, incremental updates to the data

Buildings​

• made minor, incremental updates to the data

Divisions​

• no changes, re-promoted the data from the March release

Places​

• added BrightQuery as a new POI data provider, introducing +250k new US locations and +1 million in signals to existing features
• changed the default value of the operating_status property to null instead of open
• updates to default confidence values of existing providers

Transportation​

• OSM Cut-Off Date: 2026-05-10

Change Summary​

Count Changes​

Length Changes​

Schema changelog​

The changelog for Overture schema v1.17.0 is here.

Attribution​

You'll find information about attribution and licensing here.

The 2026-04-15.0 release of Overture data and v1.16.0 of the Overture schema are now available. You can access the datasets, changelog, GERS registry, bridge files, and PMTiles on AWS and Azure at the paths listed below.

Deprecations​

The categories property in the places schema is now deprecated and will be removed in the June 2026 release, replaced by the new basic_category and taxonomy properties. All three properties will be available until then to ease the transition for our users. The taxonomy documentation is here.

Getting the data and release artifacts​

You can access this month's data and release artifacts by following the process outlined here. The paths to the data and release artifacts are listed below. We encourage you to ask questions and provide feedback on the Overture Maps Discussion forum on GitHub. You can also file issues and report bugs in our data and schema repositories. If you have a suggestion for a new dataset or if you have data you'd like to contribute to Overture, you can email us at community@overturemaps.org. We’d love to hear from you.

Release data​

Microsoft Azure:

az://overturemapswestus2.blob.core.windows.net/release/2026-04-15.0/

Amazon S3:

s3://overturemaps-us-west-2/release/2026-04-15.0/

Data changelog​

Microsoft Azure:

az://overturemapswestus2.blob.core.windows.net/changelog/2026-04-15.0/

Amazon S3:

s3://overturemaps-us-west-2/changelog/2026-04-15.0/

Bridge files​

Microsoft Azure:

az://overturemapswestus2.blob.core.windows.net/bridgefiles/2026-04-15.0/

Amazon S3:

s3://overturemaps-us-west-2/bridgefiles/2026-04-15.0/

GERS registry​

Microsoft Azure:

az://overturemapswestus2.blob.core.windows.net/registry/

Amazon S3:

s3://overturemaps-us-west-2/registry/

PMTiles​

Amazon S3:

s3://overturemaps-extras-us-west-2/tiles/2026-04-15.0/

Theme-specific updates​

Addresses​

• refreshed the NAD data source: now using v22
• de-duplicated data from the Državna geodetska uprava source, used for Croatian addresses

Base​

• made minor, incremental updates to the data

Buildings​

• removed ~98M Google and Zenodo sourced building features with small areas

Divisions​

• no changes

Places​

• confidence score updates: The March release contained unexpected changes to our confidence score normalization in Meta-sourced place data. This April release rolls back those changes. We have also increased the number of signals to our places data; ~10M places now receive updated confidence scores based on third-party signal data.

Transportation​

• OSM Cut-Off Date: 2026-04-04

Change Summary​

Count Changes​

Length Changes​

Schema changelog​

The changelog for Overture schema v1.16.0 is here.

Attribution​

You'll find information about attribution and licensing here.

Overview​

The 2026-03-18.0 release of Overture data and v1.16.0 of the Overture schema are now available. You can access the datasets, changelog, GERS registry, bridge files, and PMTiles on AWS and Azure at the paths listed below.

What's new?​

The data changelog now includes columns_changed, capturing which properties changed, per feature. Also in this release, we've made several improvements to the pipeline architecture of the transportation theme, including adding several data quality improvements and fresher source data. This architectural change also lays the groundwork for integrating additional road network sources into Overture in the near future.

Deprecations​

The categories property in the places schema is now deprecated and will be removed in the June 2026 release, replaced by the new basic_category and taxonomy properties. All three properties will be available until then to ease the transition for our users. The taxonomy documentation is here.

Getting the data and release artifacts​

You can access this month's data and release artifacts by following the process outlined here. The paths to the data and release artifacts are listed below. We encourage you to ask questions and provide feedback on the Overture Maps Discussion forum on GitHub. You can also file issues and report bugs in our data and schema repositories. If you have a suggestion for a new dataset or if you have data you'd like to contribute to Overture, you can email us at community@overturemaps.org. We’d love to hear from you.

Release data​

Microsoft Azure:

az://overturemapswestus2.blob.core.windows.net/release/2026-03-18.0/

Amazon S3:

s3://overturemaps-us-west-2/release/2026-03-18.0/

Data changelog​

Microsoft Azure:

az://overturemapswestus2.blob.core.windows.net/changelog/2026-03-18.0/

Amazon S3:

s3://overturemaps-us-west-2/changelog/2026-03-18.0/

Bridge files​

Microsoft Azure:

az://overturemapswestus2.blob.core.windows.net/bridgefiles/2026-03-18.0/

Amazon S3:

s3://overturemaps-us-west-2/bridgefiles/2026-03-18.0/

GERS registry​

Microsoft Azure:

az://overturemapswestus2.blob.core.windows.net/registry/

Amazon S3:

s3://overturemaps-us-west-2/registry/

PMTiles​

Amazon S3:

s3://overturemaps-extras-us-west-2/tiles/2026-03-18.0/

Theme-specific updates​

Addresses​

• improved city, street, or number column in Slovakia, Belgium, Austria, and in Quebec, CA
• added units to Portugal, Iceland, and Baden-Württemberg DE
• added data in Lower Saxony and Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, DE

Base​

• made minor, incremental updates to the data

Buildings​

• made minor, incremental updates to the data

Divisions​

• made minor, incremental changes to the data

Places​

• made improvements to the taxonomy and basic_category fields
• adjusted methods of calculating feature-level confidence scores

Transportation​

• fixed source linear references: the sources array for segment features previously dropped positional information (between) on the last source entry; now the sources array has correct linear references, and adjacent ranges with identical values are merged into cleaner, more compact output

• cleaned up routes: routes with no identifying properties and duplicate entries covering adjacent sub-ranges have been removed

• added more accurate timestamps: update_time in the sources array now reflects the most recent timestamp across both the feature and its components, a change that accounts for ~90M source-level differences (~28% of segments) but does not affect source identity or count.

Schema changelog​

The changelog for Overture schema v1.16.0 is here.

Attribution​

You'll find information about attribution and licensing here.

That was the right call for a launch. But as Explorer has matured and more people have come to rely on it, we've learned that "useful data tool" and "thing you actually enjoy looking at" don't have to be mutually exclusive. The person most responsible for closing that gap is Jonah Adkins, Cartography Lead at Meta. "I didn't have the intention of just redoing the whole thing," Jonah says, "but I was curious what I could get Claude to do." He came up with a plan, and it was, in his words, probably 5 to 6 hours of work total over a few days. By end of day one, Explorer looked like a different site. Dana let him keep going.

("I would have felt better with a heads up," Dana says. "But it's so pretty now.")

Two modes: Explore and Inspect​

The biggest change to Explorer is the introduction of two distinct modes, accessible from the navigation bar at the top of the page.

Explore mode is the new default. The data is styled, readable, and cartographically opinionated. Places have icons. Highways look different from residential streets. Buildings have fill colors. If you want to quickly orient yourself in an area, understand what Overture covers, or demo the data to someone who's never seen it, Explore mode is where you want to be. The layers panel on the left toggles Overture's six themes on and off. Click any feature to see its properties.

Inspect mode is the spiritual successor to the original Explorer experience: show as much of the data as possible, as directly as possible. The layers panel reorganizes to mirror the Overture schema itself — base breaks down into land, water, bathymetry, land cover, and land use; transportation shows segments and connectors; divisions shows areas, boundaries, and labels. Every feature type is symbolized uniformly as simple points, lines, and polygons. Little to no filtering, very few cartographic opinions.

Think of it this way: Explore mode asks what does this place look like? Inspect mode asks what's actually in the data? Both questions are worth asking.

Globe​

When you open Explorer, you're now looking at a globe. "The globe thing is kind of stupid," Jonah admits, "but it's too easy not to do." Dana disagrees on the stupid part. The previous default dropped you in Washington, DC. The globe communicates something truer: Overture is a global dataset. Go find your place in it.

Search​

Explorer now has a search bar, a feature people have been asking for in every uesr testing session since 2024. Use the Search Type dropdown to switch between three modes:

Locality and Country searches are powered by a geocoding service built entirely from Overture's own divisions data. It covers 450,000+ cities, neighborhoods, and administrative areas worldwide, with full-text search and autocomplete. It's a nice demonstration of what you can build on Overture data.

GERS search is the one that excites us most. Paste any GERS ID into the search bar and Explorer will fly directly to that feature on the map. This is powered by the GERS manifest in the Overture STAC catalog, which maps every GERS ID to a bounding box. If you've been writing queries and want to visually verify a feature — or if someone hands you a GERS ID and you want to know what it is — this is now a one-step operation.

Multilingual names​

Toggle between languages using the language selector to see place names rendered in dozens of languages. This comes directly from the names field in Overture data, which carries common names, alternate names, and translations from our source datasets. The richness packed into that property is easy to miss when you're writing queries; Explorer makes it visible.

Under the hood​

The styling refresh is powered by a token-based design system Jonah built for Explorer: primitives (color palette, fonts), semantics (feature-level color assignments), and components (stylesheet properties referencing the semantic values). The practical upshot is that adding a new map style — dark mode, for example — means changing one file. Explorer is also built on Next.js, which sets up a better foundation for adding features and making it easier for contributors to build on top of.

Explorer is pinned to a specific Overture release. Updates go through a validation process — a script called, yes, dont-dream-its-overture — that audits stylesheets against the current schema and tile metadata before changes reach the live site. This means Explorer doesn't silently drift out of sync with the data. When you see a property in the inspector panel, it's a property that's actually in the schema.

We also want to be clear: Explorer is still fundamentally a data and schema inspector, not a finished cartographic product. But it's also proof of what's possible with Overture data. The components are open source and the design system is built to be extended. We hope people take it and run with it.

Source code is in the explore-site repository. Issues and PRs welcome.

What's next​

Explorer is a tool for getting oriented with Overture data. Once you know what you're looking for, the Python CLI and DuckDB are your next steps for downloading and querying at scale. The schema reference is the place to go when you want to understand what those properties in the inspector panel actually mean.

The 2026-02-18.0 release of Overture data and v1.16.0 of the Overture schema are now available. You can access the datasets, changelog, GERS registry, bridge files, and PMTiles on AWS and Azure at the paths listed below.

What's new?​

In this release, we added a new admin_level property to the divisions schema to represent a division’s position in its country’s hierarchy, e.g. 0, 1, 2. We also updated our places guide with more information about our recent taxonomy work, including mappings across the basic_category, taxonomy, and categories properties. Last but not least, we updated our address data for Norway and made small improvements to our address schema thanks to user feedback from Johannes-Andersen. Keep the comments and discussions coming!

Deprecations​

The categories property in the places schema is now deprecated and will be removed in the June 2026 release, replaced by the new basic_category and taxonomy properties. All three properties will be available until then to ease the transition for our users.

Getting the data and release artifacts​

You can access this month's data and release artifacts by following the process outlined here. The paths to the data and release artifacts are listed below. We encourage you to ask questions and provide feedback on the Overture Maps Discussion forum on GitHub. You can also file issues and report bugs in our data and schema repositories. If you have a suggestion for a new dataset or if you have data you'd like to contribute to Overture, you can email us at community@overturemaps.org. We’d love to hear from you.

Release data​

Microsoft Azure:

az://overturemapswestus2.blob.core.windows.net/release/2026-02-18.0/

Amazon S3:

s3://overturemaps-us-west-2/release/2026-02-18.0/

Data changelog​

Microsoft Azure:

az://overturemapswestus2.blob.core.windows.net/changelog/2026-02-18.0/

Amazon S3:

s3://overturemaps-us-west-2/changelog/2026-02-18.0/

Bridge files​

Microsoft Azure:

az://overturemapswestus2.blob.core.windows.net/bridgefiles/2026-02-18.0/

Amazon S3:

s3://overturemaps-us-west-2/bridgefiles/2026-02-18.0/

GERS registry​

Microsoft Azure:

az://overturemapswestus2.blob.core.windows.net/registry/

Amazon S3:

s3://overturemaps-us-west-2/registry/

PMTiles​

Amazon S3:

s3://overturemaps-extras-us-west-2/tiles/2026-02-18.0/

Theme-specific updates​

Addresses​

• refreshed data in the following countries: Canada, Poland, Spain, Austria, US, Latvia, and Finland
• updated Norway and improved our schema thanks to user feedback from Johannes-Andersen.

Base​

• made minor, incremental updates to the data

Buildings​

• made minor, incremental updates to the data

Divisions​

• added new admin_level property to better represent a division's position in its country's administrative hierarchy, i.e. lower numbers correspond to higher level administrative units (0, 1, and 2).
• adjusted top-level subtypes in Antigua and Barbuda.

Places​

• refreshed Foursquare data
• updated matching priorities, causing a slight drop in the number of PinMeTo-sourced place records

Transportation​

• OSM cut-off date: 2026-02-08
• added TomTom-sourced road segments in 65+ new countries including Azerbaijan, Sri Lanka, Nigeria, and El Salvador
• ingested over 1.6M new TomTom-sourced road segments with a combined length of over 280k km
• increased the total number of connectors to 405.9M and the total number of segments to 341.7M

Schema changelog​

The changelog for Overture schema v1.16.0 is here.

Attribution​

You'll find information about attribution and licensing here.

Here's our STAC, from the top. https://stac.overturemaps.org/.

{
  "type": "Catalog",
  "id": "Overture Releases",
  "stac_version": "1.1.0",
  "description": "All Overture Releases",
  "links": [
    {
      "rel": "root",
      "href": "./catalog.json",
      "type": "application/json"
    },
    {
      "rel": "child",
      "href": "./2026-01-21.0/catalog.json",
      "type": "application/json",
      "title": "Latest Overture Release",
      "latest": true
    },
    {
      "rel": "child",
      "href": "./2025-12-17.0/catalog.json",
      "type": "application/json",
      "title": "2025-12-17.0 Overture Release"
    }
  ],
  "latest": "2026-01-21.0",

Why We Needed This​

Many of the examples in our docs instruct users to sip or gulp Overture data directly from our public cloud buckets, at very long endpoints like s3://overturemaps-us-west-2/release/2026-01-21.0/theme=buildings/type=building/*.parquet.

(*Not so long ago Paul Ramsey wrote that the trickiest part of accessing Overture data was figuring out how to construct the endpoint. Noted.*)

Using well-structured files on cloud storage as a de facto API for data distribution isn't new. It's actually one of the most important ideas in cloud-native geospatial. Back in 2014, when the AWS open data team put Landsat imagery on S3, they didn't build any custom tooling. No servers. They made well-structured data available on public cloud storage and let people have at it over HTTP. This principle is what makes Cloud Optimized GeoTIFFs work for raster imagery, PMTiles for map tiles, and GeoParquet for vector map data. The storage endpoint is the API.

For Overture, this means tools like DuckDB can query gigabytes of data because Parquet's Hive-style partitioning (theme=buildings/type=building/*.parquet) and built-in row group statistics let query engines skip irrelevant files and irrelevant chunks within files. Users can quickly download megabytes. They don't have to drink the ocean to get the data they want.

The pattern works best with stable endpoints. Things break when endpoints change unpredictably. Overture releases monthly, partitions data by theme and type, and divides its global datasets across multiple Parquet files. All of these factors go into the construction of the S3 and Azure paths. Hardcode a path today, and it's stale in few weeks. We knew this was a pain point for users, but we expected people to build their own solutions around it. Like the AWS team back in 2014, our philosophy was: give people the data and get out of the way.

Not everyone was happy about this. Many users have asked Overture to provide APIs (and SDKs, mostly to handle the complexity of our schema). We did build overturemaps-py, our Python client, to abstract from those long endpoints, but even early versions of that tool had a hardcoded path to the data and required a manual update after each release.

Internally, the pressure to build better tooling came from a different direction. As we migrated more data pipelines from member company infrastructure onto Overture infrastructure, we needed better solutions for keeping things in sync across themes and releases. STAC has helped tremendously. It also lets us access metadata to speed up queries and requests. And because it's the same catalog we publish externally, it solves a lot of user pain points too.

This Makes Your Life Easier Too (We Hope!)​

If you've ever hardcoded an S3 path to Overture data and had it break when we released a new version, we're sorry. Try using Overture STAC. The catalog rebuilds daily directly from our production environment. Instead of checking our release notes or guessing at paths, query the catalog directly to get the latest release:

curl https://stac.overturemaps.org | jq -r '.latest'

Or if you're in DuckDB:

SELECT latest FROM 'https://stac.overturemaps.org/catalog.json';

Even better, create a variable to use the latest release endpoint in all your queries.

SET VARIABLE latest = (SELECT latest FROM 'https://stac.overturemaps.org/catalog.json');

SELECT * FROM read_parquet(
    's3://overturemaps-us-west-2/release/'
    || getvariable('latest')
    || '/theme=addresses/type=address/*'
) LIMIT 10;

Your scripts stay stable even as the underlying data and cloud storage endpoints update.

Explore the Metadata​

You can quickly poke around the catalog using the STAC browser. Click into any release and theme, and you'll find links to GeoParquet files on AWS and Azure. You'll also see PMTiles listed under additional resources. Hover over those for a link to load the tiles directly in PMTiles Viewer. This is the data that powers our Explorer site.

If you want to go deeper, you can drill into a specific release to see which themes it contains and which schema version it uses, then into a theme to find PMTiles links and the available types. Each type is a STAC collection with feature counts, spatial extent, license, and column names, enough to know what you're getting before you download anything. The catalog also includes a peek into our GERS registry by providing a full manifest of the registry files.

If you're using Python, you can install pystac to explore the catalog programmatically. Here's a script that grabs feature counts in the latest Overture release.

import pystac

catalog = pystac.Catalog.from_file("https://stac.overturemaps.org/catalog.json")
latest = next(c for c in catalog.get_children() if c.extra_fields.get("latest"))

print(f"Release: {latest.id}")
print(f"Schema:  {latest.extra_fields['schema:version']}\n")

for theme in latest.get_children():
    print(f"{theme.id}:")
    for collection in theme.get_children():
        count = collection.extra_fields.get("features", "?")
        if isinstance(count, int):
            count = f"{count:,}"
        print(f"  {collection.id}: {count} features")

Release: 2026-01-21.0
Schema:  1.15.0

divisions:
  division: 4,575,616 features
  division_area: 1,068,997 features
  division_boundary: 87,814 features
places:
  place: 72,444,739 features
addresses:
  address: 460,734,720 features
transportation:
  connector: 401,294,301 features
  segment: 338,773,725 features
buildings:
  building: 2,540,587,907 features
  building_part: 3,577,657 features
base:
  bathymetry: 59,963 features
  infrastructure: 144,896,847 features
  land: 71,029,712 features
  land_cover: 123,302,114 features
  land_use: 53,037,060 features
  water: 63,442,033 features

Now let's dig into the metadata for the building type:

import pystac

collection = pystac.Collection.from_file(
    "https://stac.overturemaps.org/2026-01-21.0/buildings/building/collection.json"
)

num_files = sum(1 for link in collection.links if link.rel == "item")

print(f"Type:          {collection.id}")
print(f"Features:      {collection.extra_fields['features']:,}")
print(f"License:       {collection.license}")
print(f"Parquet files: {num_files}")
print(f"Columns:       {collection.summaries.lists.get('columns', [])}")

Type:          building
Features:      2,540,587,907
License:       ODbL-1.0
Parquet files: 236
Columns:       ['id', 'geometry', 'bbox', 'version', 'sources', 'level', 'subtype', 'class', 'height', 'names', 'has_parts', 'is_underground', 'num_floors', 'num_floors_underground', 'min_height', 'min_floor', 'facade_color', 'facade_material', 'roof_material', 'roof_shape', 'roof_direction', 'roof_orientation', 'roof_color', 'roof_height']

You can even fetch the bounding boxes and AWS and Azure paths to individual Parquet files. Exciting!

  00000
  bbox: [-179.9685336, -84.2945957, -2.8229824, -22.499915]
  aws: https://overturemaps-us-west-2.s3.us-west-2.amazonaws.com/release/2026-01-21.0/theme=buildings/type=building/part-00000-47160ab1-2f19-4475-89f8-cc1348df69a6-c000.zstd.parquet
  azure: https://overturemapswestus2.blob.core.windows.net/release/2026-01-21.0/theme=buildings/type=building/part-00000-47160ab1-2f19-4475-89f8-cc1348df69a6-c000.zstd.parquet

  00001
  bbox: [-71.7188172, -33.7503154, -56.249949, -28.1249106]
  aws: https://overturemaps-us-west-2.s3.us-west-2.amazonaws.com/release/2026-01-21.0/theme=buildings/type=building/part-00001-47160ab1-2f19-4475-89f8-cc1348df69a6-c000.zstd.parquet
  azure: https://overturemapswestus2.blob.core.windows.net/release/2026-01-21.0/theme=buildings/type=building/part-00001-47160ab1-2f19-4475-89f8-cc1348df69a6-c000.zstd.parquet

  00002
  bbox: [-67.5002494, -30.937648, -50.6249127, -22.4999315]
  aws: https://overturemaps-us-west-2.s3.us-west-2.amazonaws.com/release/2026-01-21.0/theme=buildings/type=building/part-00002-47160ab1-2f19-4475-89f8-cc1348df69a6-c000.zstd.parquet
  azure: https://overturemapswestus2.blob.core.windows.net/release/2026-01-21.0/theme=buildings/type=building/part-00002-47160ab1-2f19-4475-89f8-cc1348df69a6-c000.zstd.parquet

GERS Registry Manifest​

The catalog also includes the GERS registry manifest. The registry is split into dozens of Parquet files, sorted by ID, and the manifest lists the maximum ID in each file:

"manifest": [
  ["part-00000-...zstd.parquet", "0492a38d-6c33-417c-abd4-de67d7a1b2d8"],
  ["part-00001-...zstd.parquet", "09ff1f68-d9e0-4739-b3b3-ef375d8bf7fe"],
  ["part-00002-...zstd.parquet", "0edc25ba-2d73-4eb7-9c6e-2648644dc125"],
  ...
]

Since GERS IDs sort lexicographically, hex character by hex character, the Python CLI can check this manifest to find exactly which file contains a GERS ID of interest. It's one small JSON fetch instead of checking every file.

What's Next​

Many of the tools I mention in this post are in active development in public GitHub repositories. We welcome your comments, questions, and contributions:

• https://github.com/OvertureMaps/stac — STAC
• https://github.com/OvertureMaps/overturemaps-py — Python CLI
• https://github.com/OvertureMaps/explore-site — Explorer

You can also build your own thing with Overture STAC. Here's a tiny website I made to share at meetups and conferences. It answers a question I consistently get from users: what's the latest Overture release? You can grab the source code here.

The 2026-01-21.0 release of Overture data and v1.15.0 of the Overture schema are now available. The datasets and release artifacts are available as GeoParquet files stored on both AWS and Azure.

Getting the data and release artifacts​

You can access this month's data and release artifacts by following the process outlined here. The paths to the data and release artifacts are listed below. We encourage you to ask questions and provide feedback on the Overture Maps Discussion forum on GitHub. You can also file issues and report bugs in our data and schema repositories. If you have a suggestion for a new dataset or if you have data you'd like to contribute to Overture, you can email us at info@overturemaps.org. We’d love to hear from you.

Release data​

Microsoft Azure:

az://overturemapswestus2.blob.core.windows.net/release/2026-01-21.0/

Amazon S3:

s3://overturemaps-us-west-2/release/2026-01-21.0/

Data changelog​

Microsoft Azure:

az://overturemapswestus2.blob.core.windows.net/changelog/2026-01-21.0/

Amazon S3:

s3://overturemaps-us-west-2/changelog/2026-01-21.0/

Bridge files​

Microsoft Azure:

az://overturemapswestus2.blob.core.windows.net/bridgefiles/2026-01-21.0/

Amazon S3:

s3://overturemaps-us-west-2/bridgefiles/2026-01-21.0/

GERS registry​

Microsoft Azure:

az://overturemapswestus2.blob.core.windows.net/registry/

Amazon S3:

s3://overturemaps-us-west-2/registry/

Theme-specific updates​

Addresses​

• re-promoted December data, which included new province-level dataset for Quebec from Le ministère des Ressources naturelles et des Forêts

Base​

• made minor, incremental updates to the data

Buildings​

• made minor, incremental updates to the data

Divisions​

• made minor, incremental updates to the data

Places​

• added ~150,000 place records from DAC Group

Transportation​

• added new road segments covering 85,000 km, expanding coverage across ~150 countries

Schema changelog​

The changelog for Overture schema v1.15.0 is here.

Attribution​

You'll find information about attribution and licensing here.

The 2025-12-17.0 release of Overture data and v1.15.0 of the Overture schema are now available. The datasets and release artifacts are available as GeoParquet files stored on both AWS and Azure.

What's new?​

We added a new taxonomy property to our places schema this month, as part of our ongoing initiative to redesign the places category system. The new property offers a streamlined and logical structure with consolidated primary and alternate names and a hierarchy that makes clear the parent/child relationship between categories.

In October, we introduced the basic_category property. That property corresponds 1:1 to the primary place name in the new taxonomy property. (It also maps to the primary name in the original categories property.) The hierarchical paths in taxonomy support deeper and more logical structures. For example, in the restaurant branch, you can see a clear progression from very broad to very specific category names: restaurant > asian_restaurant > east_asian_restaurant > chinese_restaurant > cantonese_restaurant. This kind of structure makes it easier to aggregate and display POIs in meaningful ways.

The original categories property, with more than 2100 category names, will remain in the schema for the next several months so that users can compare the old system to the new taxonomy.

Examples:

1. Original categories system

properties:
   categories:
      primary: greasy_diner

2. basic_category mapped to primary category in original categories system

properties:
   basic_category: casual_eatery
   categories:
      primary: gas_station_sushi
      alternate:
         - bait_and_tackle

3. New taxonomy

properties:
   basic_category: casual_eatery
   taxonomy: 
      hierarchy: [food_and_drink, restaurant, casual_eatery, gas_station_sushi]
      primary: gas_station_sushi
      alternate:
         - gas_station
         - sushi_restaurant

Getting the data and release artifacts​

You can access this month's data and release artifacts by following the process outlined here. The paths to the data and release artifacts are listed below. We encourage you to ask questions and provide feedback on the Overture Maps Discussion forum on GitHub. You can also file issues and report bugs in our data and schema repositories. If you have a suggestion for a new dataset or if you have data you'd like to contribute to Overture, you can email us at info@overturemaps.org. We’d love to hear from you.

Release data​

Microsoft Azure:

az://overturemapswestus2.blob.core.windows.net/release/2025-12-17.0/

Amazon S3:

s3://overturemaps-us-west-2/release/2025-12-17.0/

Data changelog​

Microsoft Azure:

az://overturemapswestus2.blob.core.windows.net/changelog/2025-12-17.0/

Amazon S3:

s3://overturemaps-us-west-2/changelog/2025-12-17.0/

Bridge files​

Microsoft Azure:

az://overturemapswestus2.blob.core.windows.net/bridgefiles/2025-12-17.0/

Amazon S3:

s3://overturemaps-us-west-2/bridgefiles/2025-12-17.0/

GERS registry​

Microsoft Azure:

az://overturemapswestus2.blob.core.windows.net/registry/

Amazon S3:

s3://overturemaps-us-west-2/registry/

Theme-specific updates​

Addresses​

• added new province-level dataset for Quebec from Le ministère des Ressources naturelles et des Forêts
• removed certain placeholder values like “N/A” and “unincorporated”

Base​

• refreshed OSM data 2025-11-30
• made minor, incremental updates to the data
• added 9,690 rollercoasters to infrastructure!

Buildings​

• refreshed OSM data 2025-11-30
• made minor, incremental updates to the data

Divisions​

• refreshed OSM data
• made minor, incremental updates to the data

Places​

• added new taxonomy property

Transportation​

• added more than 725k new TomTom-sourced transportation segments in the US, Puerto Rico, Canada, Algeria, Colombia, Belarus, and Bosnia and Herzegovina

• refreshed OSM data 2025-11-30

Schema changelog​

The changelog for Overture schema v1.15.0 is here.

Attribution​

You'll find information about attribution and licensing here.

The 2025-11-19.0 release of Overture data and v1.14.0 of the Overture schema are now available. The datasets and release artifacts are available as GeoParquet files stored on both AWS and Azure. This is a minor breaking change release.

What's new?​

We added a roller_coaster class to our schema this month. Buckle up because next month we're adding rollercoaster data!

Getting the data and release artifacts​

You can access this month's data and release artifacts by following the process outlined here. The paths to the data and release artifacts are listed below. We encourage you to ask questions and provide feedback on the Overture Maps Discussion forum on GitHub. You can also file issues and report bugs in our data and schema repositories. If you have a suggestion for a new dataset or if you have data you'd like to contribute to Overture, you can email us at info@overturemaps.org. We’d love to hear from you.

Release data​

Microsoft Azure:

az://overturemapswestus2.blob.core.windows.net/release/2025-11-19.0/

Amazon S3:

s3://overturemaps-us-west-2/release/2025-11-19.0/

Data changelog​

Microsoft Azure:

az://overturemapswestus2.blob.core.windows.net/changelog/2025-11-19.0/

Amazon S3:

s3://overturemaps-us-west-2/changelog/2025-11-19.0/

Bridge files​

Microsoft Azure:

az://overturemapswestus2.blob.core.windows.net/bridgefiles/2025-11-19.0/

Amazon S3:

s3://overturemaps-us-west-2/bridgefiles/2025-11-19.0/

GERS registry​

Microsoft Azure:

az://overturemapswestus2.blob.core.windows.net/registry/

Amazon S3:

s3://overturemaps-us-west-2/registry/

Theme-specific updates​

Addresses​

• repromoted the October data release

Base​

• added a new roller_coaster class to the schema (data coming next month!)
• refreshed OSM data
• made minor, incremental updates to the data

Buildings​

• refreshed OSM data
• made minor, incremental updates to the data

Divisions​

• refreshed OSM data on 6 November 2025
• made minor, incremental updates to the data

Places​

• added ~5,000 new POIs from RenderSEO
• added ~1,500,000 new POIs from AllThePlaces
• known issue: GERS ID churn on 12 million place records

Transportation​

• added new TomTom-sourced segment data to bring the total length of road segments from TomTom to more than 1 million kilometers across 115 countries
• refreshed OSM data on 2 November 2025

Schema changelog​

The changelog for Overture schema v1.14.0 is here.

Attribution​

You'll find information about attribution and licensing here.

Overview​

The 2025-10-22.0 release of Overture data and v1.13.0 of the Overture schema are now available. The datasets and release artifacts are available as GeoParquet files stored on both AWS and Azure. There are several data updates and (minor) breaking schema changes in this release.

What's new?​

New basic_category property in the places schema​

In the places schema this month, we introduced a simple basic_category property that maps to our original categories.primary property. This change is part of a new initiative to reimagine Overture's category taxonomy. The new property is based on a commonly-used cognitive science concept called "basic-level categories," where category names balance being specific enough to be useful while general enough to be broadly applicable.

Major data updates and GERS stability in addresses​

The addresses theme has hit a new high of 455 million records, an increase of nine million records from our September release. More than 325 million of those records retained their GERS ID from the previous release, a major milestone for GERS stability as addresses moves toward General Availability next quarter.

Getting the data and release artifacts​

You can access this month's data and release artifacts by following the process outlined here. We encourage you to ask questions and provide feedback on the Overture Maps Discussion forum on GitHub. You can also file issues and report bugs in our data and schema repositories. If you have a suggestion for a new dataset or if you have data you'd like to contribute to Overture, you can email us at info@overturemaps.org. We’d love to hear from you.

The paths are:

Release data​

Microsoft Azure:

az://overturemapswestus2.blob.core.windows.net/release/2025-10-22.0/

Amazon S3:

s3://overturemaps-us-west-2/release/2025-10-22.0/

Data changelog​

Microsoft Azure:

az://overturemapswestus2.blob.core.windows.net/changelog/2025-10-22.0/

Amazon S3:

s3://overturemaps-us-west-2/changelog/2025-10-22.0/

Bridge files​

Microsoft Azure:

az://overturemapswestus2.blob.core.windows.net/bridgefiles/2025-10-22.0/

Amazon S3:

s3://overturemaps-us-west-2/bridgefiles/2025-10-22.0/

GERS registry​

Microsoft Azure:

az://overturemapswestus2.blob.core.windows.net/registry/

Amazon S3:

s3://overturemaps-us-west-2/registry/

Theme-specific updates​

Addresses​

• added additional postal_city values to NAD-sourced US addresses
• added new data in the following locations:
  • Faroe Islands
  • Serbia
  • USA
    • Mississippi
    • Idaho: Ada County
    • Oregon: Jackson County
    • Florida: Orange County, Palm Beach County
    • Michigan: Musgekon County, Kent County, Allegan County
    • many others from NAD
• refreshed data in the following locations:
  • Austria
  • Australia
  • Canada
  • Japan
  • Finland
  • Germany (Berlin, Hamburg, Hesse, Saxony)
  • Hong Kong
  • Latvia
  • Lithuania
  • Luxembourg
  • Poland
  • Slovakia
  • Spain
  • Taiwan (CHA, KEE, KHH, KIN, MIA, NWT, TAO, TNN, TPE, TXG, YUN)
  • USA
• fixed the following bugs:
  • removed unincorporated placeholder value in address_level from NAD
  • added Estonia units
  • fixed missing numbers in Lithuania
  • removed various duplicate address records
  • fixed issue sometimes causing invalid address_level values in Slovenia
• identified the following "known" issues:
  • partial loss of data in: Placer County, CA, USA; Desoto County, FL, USA; Schleswig-Holstein, DE
  • full loss of data in Kern County, CA, USA

Base​

• made minor, incremental updates to the data
• refreshed OpenStreetMap data as of 2025-10-11

Buildings​

• fixed a de-duplication bug, allowing ~5 million more Google-sourced buildings in SE Asia
• populated the license property in sources for building height data
• refreshed OpenStreetMap data as of 2025-10-11

Divisions​

• refreshed OSM data on 2025-10-02
• made minor, incremental updates to the data

Places​

• added a new basic level category property the places schema
• populated the basic level category property with data : https://github.com/OvertureMaps/schema/pull/399

Transportation​

• added new TomTom-sourced segment data
• refreshed OpenStreetMap data as of 2025-09-29

Schema changelog​

The changelog for Overture schema v1.13.0 is here.

Attribution​

You'll find information about attribution and licensing here.

Overview​

The 2025-09-24.0 release of Overture data and v1.12.0 of the Overture schema are now available. The datasets and release artifacts are available as GeoParquet files stored on both AWS and Azure. There are several data updates and (minor) breaking schema changes in this release.

What's new?​

New POIs from Foursquare Open Source Places​

This release adds approximately 6 million new POIs from Foursquare Open Source Places (FSQ OS Places) to grow the coverage of our data. We selected these records as POIs not previously included in Overture. We plan to add more Foursquare data as our validation models mature. You can find the original source for FSQ OS Places here.

Overture places is now a multi-license dataset​

Previously all places data was under a CDLA license, but in this release each place has a license based on its source property:

• Foursquare-sourced data is licensed under Apache 2.0.
• Data from other sources remains licensed under CDLA 2.0. Note that all Foursquare-sourced data is single sourced, meaning we do not blend its attributes with any other sources.

License requirements​

If you use, modify, or redistribute the Foursquare data, you must:

• Provide a copy of the Apache 2.0 license.
• State that you changed the files and include the date of any changes.
• Preserve attribution notices from the source NOTICE file, including at minimum: Copyright 2024 Foursquare Labs, Inc. All rights reserved.

More information on license requirements and data usage is available on Foursquare’s website. General information on Overture licensing is available in the licensing and attribution section of Overture's documentation.

How to filter for CDLA-only data​

To create a purely CDLA-licensed dataset, filter out all records where the source property is “Foursquare”.

New schema properties​

This month we added a new license sub-property within the sources property to more clearly link entities to the licensing information for their source data. This change affects all Overture themes, as sources is a top-level property in the Overture schema.

In the places theme, we added a new operating_status property, with all values set to "open". In future releases, we plan to update this property with data that indicates whether a place is "open", "permanently_closed", or "temporarily_closed".

Signal "patches"​

About a million POIs in our places theme now have a signal "patch" that determines the calculation of the score in the confidence property. POIs enhanced by these patches have "SparkGeo-confidence-conflation" in the sources property.

Getting the data​

You can access this month's data and release artifacts by following the process outlined here. We encourage you to ask questions and provide feedback on the Overture Maps Discussion forum on GitHub. You can also file issues and report bugs in our data and schema repositories. If you have a suggestion for a new dataset or if you have data you'd like to contribute to Overture, you can email us at info@overturemaps.org. We’d love to hear from you.

The paths are:

Release data​

Microsoft Azure:

az://overturemapswestus2.blob.core.windows.net/release/2025-09-24.0/

Amazon S3:

s3://overturemaps-us-west-2/release/2025-09-24.0/

Data changelog​

Microsoft Azure:

az://overturemapswestus2.blob.core.windows.net/changelog/2025-09-24.0/

Amazon S3:

s3://overturemaps-us-west-2/changelog/2025-09-24.0/

Bridge files​

Microsoft Azure:

az://overturemapswestus2.blob.core.windows.net/bridgefiles/2025-09-24.0/

Amazon S3:

s3://overturemaps-us-west-2/bridgefiles/2025-09-24.0/

GERS Registry​

Microsoft Azure:

az://overturemapswestus2.blob.core.windows.net/registry/

Amazon S3:

s3://overturemaps-us-west-2/registry/

Theme-specific updates​

Addresses​

• added a new license property within sources

Base​

• added a new license property within sources and populated with applicable license information

Buildings​

• added a new license property within sources and populated with applicable license information for Microsoft and OSM features.

Divisions​

• added a new license property within sources and populated with applicable license information

• added geoBoundaries-sourced counties in New Zealand

• added LINZ-sourced localities and neighborhoods in New Zealand

• mapped OSM features with an admin_level=7 tag in Argentina to localadmin

• fixed local_type for geoBoundaries-sourced counties

• refreshed OSM with updates to 2025-08-29

Places​

• added a new license property within sources and populated with applicable license information

• added a new operating_status property, indicating the operating status of a place ("open", "permanently_closed", "temporarily_closed"); set all values to "open" for the September release.

• added six million POIs from Foursquare

• implemented signal “patches” to dynamically update confidence property based on signals

Transportation​

• added a new license property within sources and populated with applicable license information

• added new TomTom-sourced segments

• made significant additions to the data in Italy, Portugal, Mexico, Egypt, Sweden, Indonesia

Schema changelog​

The changelog for Overture schema v1.12.0 is here.

Attribution​

You'll find information about attribution and licensing here.

s3://overturemaps-us-west-2/release/2025-08-20.1

wasbs://release@overturemapswestus2.blob.core.windows.net/2025-08-20.1

Overview​

The 2025-08-20.0 release of Overture data and v1.11.0 of the Overture schema are now available. The datasets and release artifacts are available as GeoParquet files stored on both AWS and Azure. The paths are:

Release data​

Microsoft Azure:

az://overturemapswestus2.blob.core.windows.net/release/2025-08-20.0/

Amazon S3:

s3://overturemaps-us-west-2/release/2025-08-20.0/

Data changelog​

Microsoft Azure:

az://overturemapswestus2.blob.core.windows.net/changelog/2025-08-20.0/

Amazon S3:

s3://overturemaps-us-west-2/changelog/2025-08-20.0/

Bridge files​

Microsoft Azure:

az://overturemapswestus2.blob.core.windows.net/bridgefiles/2025-08-20.0/

Amazon S3:

s3://overturemaps-us-west-2/bridgefiles/2025-08-20.0/

GERS Registry​

Microsoft Azure:

az://overturemapswestus2.blob.core.windows.net/registry/

Amazon S3:

s3://overturemaps-us-west-2/registry/

You can access the datasets by following the process outlined here. We encourage you to ask questions and provide feedback on the Overture Maps Discussion forum on GitHub. You can also file issues and report bugs in our data and schema repositories. If you have a suggestion for a new dataset or if you have data you'd like to contribute to Overture, you can email us at data@overturemaps.org. We’d love to hear from you.

Theme-specific updates​

Addresses​

• no updates

Base​

• added data for quay, railway, artwork classes

Buildings​

• added new data from Esri and Vancouver
• flagged a bug in the data: all Microsoft ML buildings described as underground

Divisions​

• no updates

Places​

• no updates

Transportation​

• no updates

Schema changelog​

The changelog for Overture schema v1.11.0 is here.

Attribution​

You'll find information about attribution and licensing here.

The 2025-07-23.0 release of Overture data and v1.11.0 of the Overture schema are now available. The datasets and release artifacts are available as GeoParquet files stored on both AWS and Azure. The paths are:

Release data​

Microsoft Azure:

az://overturemapswestus2.blob.core.windows.net/release/2025-07-23.0/

Amazon S3:

s3://overturemaps-us-west-2/release/2025-07-23.0/

Data changelog​

Microsoft Azure:

az://overturemapswestus2.blob.core.windows.net/changelog/2025-07-23.0/

Amazon S3:

s3://overturemaps-us-west-2/changelog/2025-07-23.0/

Bridge files​

Microsoft Azure:

az://overturemapswestus2.blob.core.windows.net/bridgefiles/2025-07-23.0/

Amazon S3:

s3://overturemaps-us-west-2/bridgefiles/2025-07-23.0/

GERS Registry​

Microsoft Azure:

az://overturemapswestus2.blob.core.windows.net/registry/

Amazon S3:

s3://overturemaps-us-west-2/registry/

You can access the datasets by following the process outlined here. We encourage you to ask questions and provide feedback on the Overture Maps Discussion forum on GitHub. You can also file issues and report bugs in our data and schema repositories. If you have a suggestion for a new dataset or if you have data you'd like to contribute to Overture, you can email us at data@overturemaps.org. We’d love to hear from you.

Theme-specific updates​

Addresses​

• no updates

Base​

• added OSM tags for quay, railway, artwork

Buildings​

• no updates

Divisions​

• added a new data source to populate favelas in Brazil: DadosAbertos
• added is_land geometries to the division_area type country subtype
• added new land polygons is_land=TRUE for regions that have access to oceans

Places​

• no updates

Transportation​

• fixed a small bug in the route source_id formatting
• added new data from TomTom in Turkey

Schema changelog​

The changelog for Overture schema v1.11.0 is here.

Attribution​

You'll find information about attribution and licensing here.