Overture Maps Places, explained for developers

Overture Places is open point-of-interest data. It is not a hosted Places API by itself.

That is the most useful mental model: Overture gives you a serious open-data foundation. You still need to turn that foundation into search.

What Overture Places contains

The Overture Places guide documents one feature type, place, and more than 75 million point representations of real-world entities. Examples include businesses, schools, hospitals, religious organizations, landmarks, and mountain peaks (Overture Places guide).

The current guide also lists source counts for June 2026, including Meta, Microsoft, Foursquare, AllThePlaces, BrightQuery, DAC, PinMeTo, and others. That source transparency is one of the reasons Overture matters: it is easier to understand the base data than with a closed place index.

What the schema looks like

Overture distributes Places as GeoParquet. The guide documents columns such as:

• id
• point geometry
• names
• categories
• basic_category
• confidence
• websites, socials, emails, phones
• brand
• addresses
• operating status
• source metadata

That is a data product. It is not a web endpoint. If your app needs GET /nearby?q=pharmacy&lat=..., you still need to build an index and API.

The files are available from Overture’s documented Amazon S3 and Azure Blob Storage release paths, which is useful for data engineering and batch analysis. It still leaves live serving to you.

Releases are monthly, and that becomes your update job

Overture publishes monthly data releases. The release calendar currently lists 2026-06-17.0 as the latest release and explains that monthly releases use date-based version tags (release calendar).

For developers, the release cadence creates two jobs:

1. Decide when a new release is safe for your product.
2. Rebuild or update whatever serving index your app uses.

If you are self-hosting, that is your pipeline. If you use a hosted API, that pipeline is part of what you are paying not to own.

What Overture does not give you

Overture does not decide your product’s ranking function. It does not host your API. It does not enforce your quotas. It does not merge in your private records. It does not create your store locator.

That is not a criticism. It is the right boundary for open data. The point is to publish useful shared data that others can build on.

What Good Enough Maps adds

Good Enough Maps serves a selected production subset of Overture Places as a backend API:

• one /v1/places endpoint
• server-side bearer auth
• JSON result schema
• 39 million places across 18 countries and territories
• flat quotas with hard caps
• account-owned layers for corrections, suppressions, and private records
• OpenAPI docs

We do not expose every Overture field. We intentionally keep the public result small: name, coordinates, distance, categories, and address. The narrower result is what makes the API predictable.

FAQ

What is Overture Places?

Overture Places is the Overture Maps Foundation dataset theme for real-world places, represented as point features with documented schema and source metadata.

Is Overture Places an API?

No. Overture publishes data files. To serve product traffic, you need a search index, API, deployment, monitoring, updates, and a ranking policy.

What does Good Enough Maps add?

Good Enough Maps turns selected Overture Places coverage into a hosted proximity search API with auth, quotas, docs, and account-owned layers.

Last validated 2026-06-23.