Overture Maps vs OpenStreetMap: What’s the Difference and Which Should You Use?
We were recently helping a retail analytics company decide which basemap and Point of Interest (POI) dataset to standardize on. They had been using OpenStreetMap (OSM) extracts for years, but their data engineers were spending an inordinate amount of time dealing with inconsistent tag schemas and missing business names.
The question naturally arose: “Should we switch to the new Overture Maps datasets?”
The short answer is that Overture isn’t replacing OSM; it’s building on top of it. OpenStreetMap is the world’s most detailed, community-driven geographic database. Overture, driven by a foundation including Meta, Amazon, and Microsoft, ingests OSM data, merges it with other massive open datasets, and normalizes it into a highly structured, cloud-native format.
For routing and hyper-local pathfinding, raw OSM remains unbeaten. But for commercial POI analysis or building footprint extraction at scale, Overture’s standardized schema is a game-changer.
Here is how we interact with Overture data directly from their Amazon S3 buckets using DuckDB in Python, completely skipping the painful XML parsing typically associated with OSM:
import duckdb
# ... (Setup DuckDB connection)
# We want to pull all commercial buildings and POIs for a specific bounding box (e.g., Downtown Seattle)
# Overture publishes everything as partitioned, cloud-optimized Parquet files!
query = """
INSTALL httpfs;
LOAD httpfs;
INSTALL spatial;
LOAD spatial;
-- Query directly from Overture's S3 bucket without downloading the whole world
SELECT
id,
names.primary as name,
categories.main as category,
ST_GeomFromWKB(geometry) as geom
FROM
read_parquet('s3://overturemaps-us-west-2/release/2024-03-12-alpha.0/theme=places/type=*/*.parquet')
WHERE
bbox.xmin > -122.35 AND bbox.xmax < -122.31 AND bbox.ymin > 47.59 AND bbox.ymax < 47.63
AND categories.main = 'restaurant';
"""
# ...
df = duckdb.query(query).to_df()
print(f"Found {len(df)} restaurants instantly!")
If your project requires heavily standardized attributes across millions of records and you want to query directly from a data lake, Overture is the way to go. If you are building a specialized routing engine or need immediate updates made by local mappers, stick to standard OSM extracts.
Godspeed!
