Blog

Improving Overture Places Geolocation and Coverage with Zephr, Mapillary, and the “Places Imagery Task Force”

By [Albi Wiedersberg](/content/author/albi/ "Posts by Albi Wiedersberg"/index.html)
If you have ever followed a map to a storefront only to end up standing in an empty parking lot, you have experienced the limits of traditional geocoding. Like other…

Open Spatial & Location Grounding for AI

By [Albi Wiedersberg](/content/author/albi/ "Posts by Albi Wiedersberg"/index.html)
LLMs are highly capable at many things, but understanding the physical world isn't one of them. Today, ChatGPT recommends just 1.2% of all local business locations, and 83% of restaurants…

The Billion-Dollar Data Trap: Why Building Your Own Map is No Longer a Viable Business Strategy

By [Will Mortenson](/content/author/wmortenson/ "Posts by Will Mortenson"/index.html)
In the current tech landscape, we are witnessing a paradox. We are in the midst of a generational "AI arms race" that demands unprecedented capital investment, yet the era of…

Three Years In: How Overture Maps is Changing the Way the World Builds Maps

By [Will Mortenson](/content/author/wmortenson/ "Posts by Will Mortenson"/index.html)
Overture creates a common foundation of map data. We bring together open data from crowdsourced, government, and machine learning sources, then do the work of normalizing it to a single…

GeoBuiz Summit 2026 Highlights: Collaboration, Interoperability, and Infrastructure

By [Overture Maps](/content/author/overture/ "Posts by Overture Maps"/index.html)
Overture Maps Foundation participated in GeoBuiz Summit 2026 from January 12 to 14, joining leaders across industry, government, and academia to discuss the future of open, interoperable geospatial data and…

Overture Maps Explained on Software Engineering Radio

By [Overture Maps](/content/author/overture/ "Posts by Overture Maps"/index.html)
The Overture Maps Foundation is now three years old, and we’ve met every milestone we’ve set out to meet. But there’s still much more to come. Please enjoy this interview…

From Discovery to Action: A New Foundation for Travel

By [Albi Wiedersberg](/content/author/albi/ "Posts by Albi Wiedersberg"/index.html)
Imagine asking an AI agent to book a hotel. The agent books the room, finds restaurants you like, a concert venue nearby, and lines up ground transportation. This smooth, integrated…

Building Complete Address Coverage: How We Brought Every Address in Mississippi Together

By [Jeff Underwood](/content/author/jeff/ "Posts by Jeff Underwood"/index.html)
Coverage in Jackson Mississippi To the uninitiated, address data appears simple. Scrawl an address on an envelope and a postal service will deliver it to the specified destination. However, the…

Open Collaboration Wins: Overture Named to Fast Company’s 2025 Next Big Things in Tech

By [Marc Prioleau](/content/author/mprioleau/ "Posts by Marc Prioleau"/index.html)
We’ve long thought that we’re onto something big here at Overture. And now the rest of the world does, too. I’m pleased to announce that Fast Company has recognized the…

Overture and the OpenTravel Alliance: Enabling the Future of Travel with Open Data

By [Overture Maps](/content/author/overture/ "Posts by Overture Maps"/index.html)
Overture is collaborating with the OpenTravel Alliance (OTA), which recently joined the Linux Foundation and Overture as a member, to solve a long-standing challenge in the travel industry: data interoperability.…