Hello there 👋,
I’m Jonah Adkins, a cartographer at Meta and chair of the Divisions Task Force at Overture. I’ve been part of Overture since the early days, contributing to themes like Base, Divisions, and now Places, with one goal in mind: making open map data easier to use, especially for cartographers like me.
This month, we’re introducing the first part of a new Places category system, something many of you have been waiting for. The previous version included over 2,000 categories, which often led to confusion and extra work for developers. We’ve rethought the structure from the ground up, guided by real-world use cases, cartographic needs, and input from across Overture’s member companies.
At the center of this release is a new column called basic_category, which follows a “middle-out” strategy based on a model in cognitive science. Instead of starting from the top (broad types) or the bottom (specific instances), we focused on identifying cognitively basic types — categories that are recognizable, stable, and easy to reason about. From there, we built both upward (generalizations) and downward (specializations) to form a four-level hierarchy. Whether you’re tagging a pizza shop or a train station, this approach helps make Places easier to understand, display, and use consistently.
Huge thanks to Drishtie Patel, Overture’s product manager, who led the effort to align our member companies around this work and guided the product execution that made it possible. This is the most significant schema update since Places launched, and it will have a wide-reaching impact across matching, benchmarking, and validation.
I also want to acknowledge Ron Rice, a senior taxonomist at Meta, whose research and expertise were foundational to defining the basic-level categories in this release.
And of course, this work wouldn’t have come together without the contributions of many analysts and engineers across the Overture community — including Stephen Epps, Jeff Underwood, and Warren Ehrenfried, who played key roles in implementing, refining, and validating the new categories. This was truly a cross-team effort, and I’m grateful for everyone who helped bring it to life.
The end goal is to provide a new taxonomy, a shared structure that can connect across Overture’s themes. Imagine a hospital in Places linking to its buildings in the Buildings theme and its campus footprint in Base. That kind of cross-theme integration is where we’re headed.
From my experience in cartography, I know how much effort it takes to make raw data ready for display. Some level of cartographic massaging will always be necessary, but with Overture, we have the opportunity to evolve data and display needs together, right from the start. If our schema is too complex for cartographers to work with, that’s usually a sign that the model needs refinement.
That same principle shaped how we grouped and named categories in this release. Working with the Places Task Force and taxonomists at Meta, we applied cartographic design principles to ensure categories are both human-readable and system-friendly.
We welcome all feedback, especially real examples from your projects. If a category is missing, unclear, or too broad, show us how you use it. The more context you share, the better we can refine it for everyone.
A year from now, success will mean that the new categories are stable, widely used, and connected across multiple themes. That will allow people to search and visualize Places data with more consistency and accuracy.
There’s also plenty more in this month’s release, including validation and quality improvements across other themes, made possible by the collaboration of many member teams from companies including TomTom, Esri, Microsoft, and Tripadvisor. Thank you to everyone who helped bring this together. Also, special thanks to my cats, who helped me through more than one long taxonomy discussion with moral support and well-timed naps.
Try it out, send feedback, and keep building with us. Every contribution helps make the data stronger and more useful for the community.
Enjoy the data,
Jonah
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