Simon Willison’s Weblog

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6 items tagged “overture”

Overture provides interoperable open map data.

2024

Conflating Overture Places Using DuckDB, Ollama, Embeddings, and More. Drew Breunig's detailed tutorial on "conflation" - combining different geospatial data sources by de-duplicating address strings such as RESTAURANT LOS ARCOS,3359 FOOTHILL BLVD,OAKLAND,94601 and LOS ARCOS TAQUERIA,3359 FOOTHILL BLVD,OAKLAND,94601.

Drew uses an entirely offline stack based around Python, DuckDB and Ollama and finds that a combination of H3 geospatial tiles and mxbai-embed-large embeddings (though other embedding models should work equally well) gets really good results.

# 30th September 2024, 5:24 pm / gis, python, ai, duckdb, embeddings, drew-breunig, overture

Towards Standardizing Place. Overture Maps announced General Availability of its global maps datasets last week, covering places, buildings, divisions, and base layers.

Drew Breunig demonstrates how this can be accessed using both the Overture Explorer tool and DuckDB, and talks about Overture's GERS IDs - reminiscent of Who's On First IDs - which provide stable IDs for all kinds of geographic places.

# 1st August 2024, 11:14 pm / geospatial, gis, whosonfirst, drew-breunig, overture

A POI Database in One Line (via) Overture maps offer an extraordinarily useful freely licensed databases of POI (point of interest) listings, principally derived from partners such as Facebook and including restaurants, shops, museums and other locations from all around the world.

Their new "overturemaps" Python CLI utility makes it easy to quickly pull subsets of their data... but requires you to provide a bounding box to do so.

Drew Breunig came up with this delightful recipe for fetching data using LLM and gpt-3.5-turbo to fill in those bounding boxes:

overturemaps download --bbox=$(llm 'Give me a bounding box for Alameda, California expressed as only four numbers delineated by commas, with no spaces, longitude preceding latitude.') -f geojsonseq --type=place | geojson-to-sqlite alameda.db places - --nl --pk=id

# 19th April 2024, 2:44 am / gis, geojson, llm, drew-breunig, overture

How to make self-hosted maps that work everywhere and cost next to nothing. Chris Amico provides a detailed roundup of the state of web mapping in 2024. It’s never been easier to entirely host your own mapping infrastructure, thanks to OpenStreetMap, Overture, MBTiles, PMTiles, Maplibre and a whole ecosystem of other fine open source projects.

I like Protomaps creator Brandon Liu’s description of this: “post-scarcity web mapping”.

# 24th February 2024, 4:19 am / gis, maps, chris-amico, overture

2023

DALL-E 3, GPT4All, PMTiles, sqlite-migrate, datasette-edit-schema

Visit DALL-E 3, GPT4All, PMTiles, sqlite-migrate, datasette-edit-schema

I wrote a lot this week. I also did some fun research into new options for self-hosting vector maps and pushed out several new releases of plugins.

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Overture Maps Foundation Releases Its First World-Wide Open Map Dataset. The Overture Maps Foundation is a collaboration lead by Amazon, Meta, Microsoft and TomTom dedicated to producing “reliable, easy-to-use, and interoperable open map data”.

Yesterday they put out their first release and it’s pretty astonishing: four different layers of geodata, covering Places of Interest (shops, restaurants, attractions etc), administrative boundaries, building outlines and transportation networks.

The data is available as Parquet. I just downloaded the 8GB places dataset and can confirm that it contains 59 million listings from around the world—I filtered to just places in my local town and a spot check showed that recently opened businesses (last 12 months) were present and the details all looked accurate.

The places data is licensed under “Community Data License Agreement – Permissive” which looks like the only restriction is that you have to include that license when you further share the data.

# 27th July 2023, 4:45 pm / gis, open-data, parquet, meta, overture