Members spanning technology, public sector, academia and non-profits standardize on open spatial data and unique IDs via GERS

Summary

• Overture’s membership has nearly doubled since 2024, with new additions spanning tech, government, academia, and non-profits (including Grab, Uber, Samsara, Fresno County, and UC Santa Cruz).
• By adopting Overture data across buildings, addresses, and administrative divisions, Microsoft saw several percentage points of improvement in address accuracy, major gains in building coverage, and cut development cycles from months to weeks.
• Members like Meta, TomTom, Tripadvisor, and Uber contribute live signals (foot traffic, ratings, pickups/drop-offs) so Overture’s data stays current, as shown in the June 2026 Places dataset update.

SAN FRANCISCO, July 13, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — Overture Maps Foundation, a collaborative effort to build a foundational base layer of map data to facilitate data exchange, today announced it has reached 50 members, nearly doubling its 2024 count, as more industries turn to open spatial data to ground AI systems in the real world.

As organizations race to operationalize AI, a critical gap has emerged. Without a shared, stable reference for physical places, large language models and AI agents risk generating inaccurate or unsafe outputs. As such, organizations – both commercial and public – are increasingly converging on Overture’s open base map layers and its Global Entity Reference System (GERS) to provide a reliable foundation for real-world reasoning.

While Overture provides open base data, GERS makes it easier to attach other data to that base data because each entity has its own unique IDs. Such clarity is essential for LLMs and AI agents that may be working autonomously.

That’s because AI systems trained on static or incomplete data may hallucinate locations, miss real-world entities, or mislabel places entirely. Overture’s GERS assigns every place, road, and boundary a stable, resolvable identifier, enabling AI pipelines to anchor outputs to real-world entities instead of probabilistic guesses. Combined with cloud-native GeoParquet formats and a machine-readable schema, Overture’s data is purpose-built for AI-native workflows.

“AI can’t reason about the physical world without an open, verifiable foundation beneath it,” said Will Mortenson, Executive Director at Overture Maps Foundation. “GERS gives AI builders that ground truth – shared, vendor-neutral, and free from lock-in. That’s what’s driving Overture’s growth, and we look forward to much more ahead.”

Overture’s newest members span technology, government, academia and non-profit sectors. They include Cotality, e Foundation, Fresno County, Fused, the Global Earthquake Model (GEM) Foundation, Grab, the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team, Intellias, Krick, Maxar/Vantor, MobilityData, Neusoft, Nology, Rafiki, Regrid, Samsara, Smarty, Staer, Uber, the University of California Santa Cruz, Voygr, Wherobots, and Zephr. Learn more about why these new members support Overture in this blog.

The new members join existing Overture members, including founders Amazon Web Services (AWS), Meta, Microsoft and TomTom. Hosted by the Linux Foundation, Overture members benefit from an open, vendor neutral approach to spatial data and contribute to making it better. For example:

• By adopting Overture data across key map layers – including buildings, addresses, and administrative divisions – Microsoft has improved map accuracy, expanded global coverage, and simplified its underlying infrastructure. The company reports several percentage point gains in address accuracy, significant improvements in building coverage, and shorter development cycles from months to weeks for new features. By standardizing on Overture’s open datasets and infrastructure, Microsoft has reduced technical debt, eliminated duplicate systems, and accelerated innovation across its mapping platform.

• Rather than relying on static sources like web scraping or manual updates, Overture leverages real-world “heartbeat” signals to keep data continuously current. Members including Meta, TomTom, Tripadvisor, and Uber securely contribute these heartbeat signals – including pickups and drop-offs, ratings and reviews, foot traffic, traffic patterns and interactions at physical locations – to keep the data continuously updated. By pooling these signals, Overture delivers a more current and accurate view of the physical world than any single organization could maintain alone.

As a result of this collaboration, Overture’s June 2026 data release introduced significant updates to its Places dataset, improving how the industry tracks the real-world status of businesses. The release refreshed “operating status” fields for U.S. points of interest, using aggregated, anonymized signals contributed by members.

“By contributing to this collaborative model, members help address common mapping challenges and ensure up-to-date, accurate data that benefits the entire ecosystem,” said Albi Wiedersberg, Vice President of Product at the Overture Maps Foundation.

Together, these contributions are accelerating the development of a shared, open foundation for spatial data – one that enables developers, enterprises, and AI systems to better understand and interact with the real world.

To become a member and start contributing to Overture, please visit https://overturemaps.org/become-a-member

About Overture Maps Foundation
Founded in 2022 by Amazon Web Services (AWS), Meta, Microsoft, and TomTom, Overture Maps Foundation builds a foundational base layer of open map data to facilitate data exchange across the global geospatial ecosystem. With 50 contributing companies spanning a wide swath of industries, public sector stakeholders, and mapping and geospatial communities, Overture provides the shared infrastructure and standards that enable organizations to focus on developing innovative map applications with greater efficiency.

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SOURCE Overture Maps Foundation