Accessing the Overture Catalog
The Overture catalog is everything Overture publishes with each monthly release: global map data in GeoParquet, PMTiles vector tiles, a GERS registry, bridge files, and a changelog. It's a cloud-native catalog. The files sit in Amazon S3 and Microsoft Azure Blob Storage, and you read them in place, with no server or API in between.
Overture's SpatioTemporal Asset Catalog (STAC) is the index to all of it. Start there: it names the latest release and links to the data in it.
Overture STAC
Overture STAC is the machine-readable index for all releases. Overture's own tools, including the Python client and Explorer, read it to stay in sync with the latest release, and yours can too.
The root catalog has a latest field naming the current release, the GERS registry manifest, and a child catalog for each release. Within a release, each theme has a catalog with a link to its PMTiles, and each type has a collection with its spatial extent, feature count, and column names. The collection's items point to its GeoParquet files on AWS and Azure. Bridge files and the changelog aren't in the catalog yet; find their paths on their own pages.
Get the latest release from the command line:
curl -s https://stac.overturemaps.org/catalog.json | jq -r '.latest'
Or in DuckDB:
SELECT latest FROM 'https://stac.overturemaps.org/catalog.json';
The raw JSON isn't a browsing interface. To explore the catalog visually, open it in stac-browser.
Published datasets
Overture distributes its core map data as GeoParquet files, a column-oriented spatial data format optimized for cloud-native queries. You can scan across the files and pull only the data you need without downloading everything. See this guide from the Cloud Native Geospatial Forum for more on GeoParquet.
| Provider | Path |
|---|---|
| Amazon S3 | s3://overturemaps-us-west-2/release/<RELEASE> |
| Microsoft Azure | https://overturemapswestus2.blob.core.windows.net/release/<RELEASE> |
Path structure
The base paths above point to the core map datasets in a release. Overture partitions the data by theme and type; specifying those directories narrows the data you access.
Example S3 path to the infrastructure feature type in the base theme:
s3://overturemaps-us-west-2/release/<RELEASE>/theme=base/type=infrastructure/*.parquet
Path components:
<RELEASE>: date-based version in the formatyyyy-mm-dd.x. An archive of releases is maintained on both S3 and Azure.<theme>: one of Overture's six themes: addresses, base, buildings, divisions, places, and transportation.<type>: a feature type within a theme, such asinfrastructurewithinbase.*.parquet: the*indicates all Parquet files in the directory.
Theme and type mapping
| Theme | Feature types |
|---|---|
| Addresses | address |
| Base | bathymetry, infrastructure, land, land_cover, land_use, water |
| Buildings | building, building_part |
| Divisions | division, division_area, division_boundary |
| Places | place |
| Transportation | segment, connector |
Accessing the files
The Python CLI and DuckDB are the most common ways to query and download Overture data. Both read directly from the cloud and transfer only the data you need. See the quickstart to get started with either tool.
For bulk downloads, use the AWS CLI or AzCopy to copy full Parquet directories to your local machine.
Download all files in the infrastructure type with the AWS CLI:
aws s3 cp --no-sign-request --recursive \
s3://overturemaps-us-west-2/release/<RELEASE>/theme=base/type=infrastructure/ .
Download all place data from Azure with AzCopy:
azcopy copy \
"https://overturemapswestus2.dfs.core.windows.net/release/<RELEASE>/theme=places/type=place/" \
"<local directory path>" --recursive
You can also access Overture data through Amazon Athena, Microsoft Synapse, Sedona, and other tools. See the examples for walkthroughs.
PMTiles
Overture generates PMTiles vector map tiles with each release. These tiles power the Explorer site, and Overture builds them for data inspection only.
::: warning Don't use these tiles in production. Overture may change their layers, properties, and zoom levels in any release without notice, and doesn't commit to their availability or performance. Applications that need a stable basemap should build their own tiles from Overture data. :::
| Provider | Path |
|---|---|
| Amazon S3 | s3://overturemaps-extras-us-west-2/tiles/<RELEASE>/<THEME>.pmtiles |
| HTTP | https://overturemaps-extras-us-west-2.s3.us-west-2.amazonaws.com/tiles/<RELEASE>/<THEME>.pmtiles |
Preview any PMTiles URL at pmtiles.io. To build your own tiles from Overture data, see the PMTiles example and the overture-tiles repository.
GERS registry, bridge files, and changelog
Each release includes artifacts from the Global Entity Reference System (GERS):
- GERS registry: lists GERS IDs, updated each release, with the release where each ID first and last appeared, when it last changed, its bounding box, and the path to the feature in release data.
- Bridge files: map source record IDs, such as OpenStreetMap or Meta identifiers, to the GERS IDs they contributed to, so you can trace a feature to its sources or get GERS IDs for source-keyed data with a join.
- Data changelog: reports, for every feature in every theme, whether it was added, removed, changed, or unchanged since the previous release, and for changed features, which columns differ.
Data mirrors
Several partners maintain mirrors on these platforms:
These are community-maintained resources that may offer different access patterns or platform-specific tooling.