TL;DR: 

• 🎉First newsletter! Welcome to the Overture community newsletter.
• 🚀October release is live – New address, roads, and building height data.
• 🗓️ Meet us at upcoming events – FOSS4G, PostGIS Day, and WHO GISC Knowledge Series.
• 🌟 Member & Community spotlight – Addresscloud, Esri, TomTom, and more using Overture’s data in innovative ways.
• 📰 Overture News – We’ve joined OGC as a Principal Member, Executive Director appeared on the Geomob Podcast, and several of our colleagues joined the CNG Editorial Board!

3 min read

Hello Peter 👋,

My name is Dana Bauer, and I work on developer tools, documentation, and user experience at the Overture Maps Foundation. I’m excited to kick off our first community newsletter and share the stories behind this big, ambitious, intensely collaborative open source project we’ve been working on for almost two years.

The engineers building Overture Maps are eager to connect with you, and in the next several newsletters you’ll hear from our core contributors from Meta, Microsoft, TomTom, Amazon, Esri, and more. And we’d like to hear from you: feedback and contributions from folks working with our data and schema are crucial to our success. 

Talking to the developers and GIS experts in our community is one of my favorite things about this job. You probably don’t know this but within Overture we’ve been calling you – our enthusiastic early adopters – “Data Enjoyers.” We even made a sticker in your honor.

But this newsletter isn’t just for seasoned data enjoyers. It’s a guide for everyone who wants to navigate the fast-changing world of Overture Maps, from updates to our free and open global datasets to new tools and tutorials that make it easier to adopt Overture data and schema to our growing list of projects and use cases. 

If you’re just getting started, I invite you to check out the Explorer tool, a no-code option for inspecting Overture data and metadata, the data guides for an overview of our six data themes, and the “Getting Data” section of our documentation.

If you’ve been using Overture data for a while, I’d like to hear about your experiences and your ideas for new datasets, tools, and projects. You can start a discussion thread in our data repository on GitHub or you can reach out to the team directly at community@overturemaps.org. 

Thanks for joining us on this journey. We’re glad you’re here.

Enjoy the data,

Dana

🎉 What's New This Month

Our October release just dropped…

• What’s in the October release: new address data, roads data. Invitation to share datasets. 
• Address Theme: Expanded to 344 million addresses across 24 countries, with new contributions from open data sources like OpenAddresses, AddressForAll, and NYC Open Data.
• Transportation Theme: New road data from TomTom, adding 30K+ km in Saudi Arabia and Italy.
• Building Heights: New building height data from Microsoft and Esri Community Maps contributors, improving 3D mapping and spatial analysis.

🗓️ Meet Us IRL – Upcoming Events

Want to chat maps and grab some sweet Overture swag? We'd love to meet you at:

• WHO GISC Knowledge Series: Open Data
  • Join the free panel joined by Overture's Executive Director Marc Prioleau and Nama Budhathoki from our member HOT OSM on Open Data for Global Health - Panel Conversation
  • Wed, Nov 6, 10:00 -11:00 a.m. EST
• PostGIS Day (virtual) 
  • Sign up for free to learn how to Get Started With Overture Maps by Dana Bauer and Jake Wasserman
  • Nov 21, 9:30 a.m. PST 
• FOSS4G BELÉM
  • Overture's Jennings will be speaking about Unleashing the Power of Open Data: Interoperable Solutions for a Connected World
  • Dec 5, 4:30–5:00 p.m., Room IV

🌟Member Spotlight

Our member's community is doing incredible things! Check out these highlights:

• Addresscloud processed a whopping 300 million buildings for flood risk assessment using our building footprints and GERS IDs. They're now getting sub-200ms performance - that's lightning fast! Explore the full case study.
• TomTom is using GERS to level up their transportation networks. Read our case study to learn more.
• Esri leveraged GERS to integrate FEMA’s USA Structures with Overture Buildings, enhancing their GIS capabilities. See details here.
• Paul Ramsey of Crunchy Data wrote an insightful piece about using our transportation data for routing. Read more.
• Precisely's Drew Breunig wrote a thought-provoking piece about standardizing how we talk about places and how Overture’s GERS can address that gap. Read more.

👋 Welcome to the community!

Big welcome to our newest members: Crunchy Data, E Foundation, Fresno County, Grab Maps, Intellias, and Krick!