If you publish geospatial data, you've probably done this. You put a dataset on a data portal or shared it with colleagues, maybe as a Shapefile, a GeoPackage, or a GeoParquet file. You describe its columns somewhere else: a PDF data dictionary, an FGDC metadata record, a spreadsheet of codes. Someone asks what a code means, so you add a note to the description, and later you fix a column in the data without going back to the description. Now there are three versions of the truth: the data, the portal entry, and the document. They disagree.

You do have a model. You just wrote it in a place nothing else can read. The data dictionary describes the columns, but no validator checks the data against it, and no tool can look up which values are legal. Every copy of that knowledge gets maintained by hand, and hand-maintained copies drift.

We had the same problem at Overture, at a larger scale. The Overture Schema started as JSON Schema, hand-written as YAML, with reference docs written separately and validation that only ran on JSON. When the schema changed, the docs had to catch up by hand, and they didn't always. So we asked how we could write the model so that the data, the validation, and the reference material all derive from it and can't diverge. Our answer was code. Last month we published v2.0.0 of the schema as a Python library built on Pydantic. The model is the source, and the JSON Schema, the reference docs, and the validation checks are all generated from it.

s3://overturemaps-us-west-2/release/2026-09-23.1

wasbs://release@overturemapswestus2.blob.core.windows.net/2026-09-23.1

Overview​

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/

Two weeks ago we quietly published v2.0.0 of the Overture schema to PyPI. It used to be JSON Schema, lovingly handwritten in YAML to get around some of JSON’s rough edges. Now it’s a Python library you install and import, with Pydantic models you can inspect, validate data against, build on, and extend.

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.

Overview​

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/

Overview​

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/

Each Overture Release includes the core dataset of GeoParquet features, the GERS registry, GERS bridge files, and data changelogs.

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.

Overview​

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/

Open data projects like Overture are built across time. Contributors come and go, member companies rotate people in and out, and the builders of today are extending the work of those who came before them. Part of the work of Overture is documenting how we work, to help new contributors quickly get up to speed and to capture the immense technical and organizational knowledge built up over the past few years.

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.

Overview​

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/

Overview​

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/