Overture Maps Foundation
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6
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Search complete. 11 mentions across 6 episodes found for "Overture Maps Foundation".
Sep 21, 2026
speaker_0HOST
So we've got these global efforts like for Taylor Geospatial Institute to map all using machine learning to detect and map the globe's agricultural field boundaries.
speaker_0HOST
There's also all the big tech companies sort of accumulating under Overture Maps Foundation to get the globe's building footprints and a whole lot of other stuff.
speaker_0HOST
there's also global energy monitor who's been on the podcast um climate trace um who are doing stuff to do with not only spatial data data sets but also ownership in a rigorous way like you've done um and anna mowat i think is the one that does the ownership tracker um that associates then with a lot of other trackers that global energy monitors um for example caitlin swalex uh heavy industry monitor
Ankur ShahGUEST
Totally, totally.
DanielHOST
My name is Daniel, and this is a podcast for the geospatial community.
DanielHOST
My guest today is Amy Rose, CTO of the Overture Maps Foundation.
DanielHOST
In this episode, we talk about why the world needed another map when we already have OpenStreetMap, what it means to build an opinionated dataset with a light touch, and GERS, the Global Entity Reference System, a persistent ID that lets you connect buildings, roads, places, and addresses across datasets without relying on messy spatial joins.
DanielHOST
We also get into why metadata matters more than ever now, and the biggest users of geospatial data aren't people anymore, they're machines.
DanielHOST
Amy, welcome to the podcast.
DanielHOST
It's an absolute pleasure to have you here.
DanielHOST
You are the CTO of something called Overture Maps Foundation, and I think we should probably start there.
DanielHOST
Some people will have heard of it and some people won't, but let's start there.
Ted BankenGUEST
Yeah, we'll get right into it.
Ted BankenGUEST
So today we'll be looking at the Overture Maps data set.
Ted BankenGUEST
If you're not already familiar with Overture Maps, it's a huge data set aggregated from a bunch of providers, like Microsoft, Esri, certainly, and it's a very, very large data set, billions of points globally.
Ted BankenGUEST
There's a few different themes.
Ted BankenGUEST
I know buildings is used a lot.
Ted BankenGUEST
And that inspired me to write a package, which I'll demo today, but I'll also be demoing some other things.
Ted BankenGUEST
And yeah, I know this open data is utilized in a lot of these big cloud solutions, like I know Carto infused.
Ted BankenGUEST
And even Azure, I think, has some integration in the living atlas with data sets such as Overture Maps.
Pramit KolaparaMODERATOR
The new common space humanitarian satellite, an interesting potential model for how we can pioneer the future of remote sensing data for use in humanitarian applications.
Pramit KolaparaMODERATOR
And then organizations like OpenStreetMap and Overture Maps are both taking different approaches to how we think about the future of data governance, data curation, and data access.
Pramit KolaparaMODERATOR
So despite these things, there are limits to what civil society can do.
Pramit KolaparaMODERATOR
There are challenges that they're facing.
Eddie PickleMODERATOR
But she helped at Meta.
Eddie PickleMODERATOR
Her work at Meta includes helping found the Overture Maps Foundation.
Eddie PickleMODERATOR
And it's really great to have their team presence here and to talk with us about how that can help our community.
Eddie PickleMODERATOR
And then finally, we've got Jed Sunwall, who many, many of you know.
Adam TimmGUEST
Again, I'm sure nobody in here has had that happen to them, but again, I hear that's a thing.
Adam TimmGUEST
So what if we could get developers started on a data platform that can scale very easily on demand when the need arises? What if you could query or integrate OpenStreetMaps or Overture Maps directly from your database without a whole bunch of extra complicated steps, right? Wouldn't that be nice? Again, this being an open source crowd, I'm sure most of you are familiar with Postgres and all the great capabilities that Postgres brings to the table.
Adam TimmGUEST
But one of the major limitations that Postgres has had really is it doesn't do so well at scale in the analytics and warehousing space.
Adam TimmGUEST
Now, that doesn't mean that people haven't tried to make that work with Postgres, but it really isn't the best solution in that space.