But for many customers, the question quickly became: what comes next?

Why Enriched Data?​

The Overture dataset is already a huge leap forward compared to raw OpenStreetMap. Backed by contributors like Meta, Microsoft, and others, it brings consistent schema, deduplication, and global coverage. Still, we saw that real-world use cases often need more context than what’s available out of the box.

Think about:

• Retail chains wanting brand metadata (e.g. “Starbucks” vs just a coffee shop).
• Analytics teams wanting to filter by categories more precisely.
• Businesses needing country-specific datasets layered on top of Overture for compliance, reporting, or localized detail.

That’s why we’re introducing Enriched Data.

How Enriched Data Works​

Enriched Data builds on the core Overture Places schema by joining in additional datasets hosted inside our own infrastructure. These include proprietary or curated datasets that we’ve licensed or created, which can be matched directly to Overture’s stable id field for Places/POIs.

For example:

• Add brand attributes so you can query for every “Woolworths” in Australia or every “Whole Foods” in the US.
• Join in government inspection datasets or local licensing records (where available).
• Blend open-source projects like AllThePlaces with Overture to fill in coverage gaps and keep places fresh.

From a developer’s perspective, you don’t need to change how you use the API. You can query enriched endpoints just like you query the base dataset — and you’ll get back richer metadata.

👉 Check out the Enriched Data documentation for full details on schemas, fields, and availability.

Open Source + Hosted Service​

We’ve kept to our original promise: Overture Maps API remains open source. Anyone can deploy it themselves to GCP using BigQuery as the backend, and take advantage of the free tier credits to get started.

But if you want the Enriched Data experience, that’s available only on our hosted service. This hybrid approach gives developers maximum flexibility:

• Self-host for free if you just need the base Overture data.
• Use our hosted API if you want low-latency access to global coverage, plus enriched datasets you can’t get elsewhere.

It’s the same API, same endpoints, just more powerful when you need it.

What’s Next​

Enriched Data is just the start. We’re already working on:

• Advanced tags for more precise categorization and filtering
• Translations & localization for place names and descriptions in multiple languages
• Opening hours & dates including seasonal variations and holiday schedules
• Website URLs and social media links for businesses
• Footfall data (country dependent) for understanding location traffic patterns
• Photos tied to store fronts, interiors, and POIs
• Restaurant menus with pricing and dietary information
• Cross-platform conflation to link the same place across TripAdvisor and other mapping services
• Contact us for more... custom enrichment options

Our vision is clear: to make Overture Maps API the go-to open + enriched location platform that balances flexibility, cost, and licensing freedom with the kind of metadata richness that unlocks enterprise use cases.

🚀 Ready to explore? Start with the demo app or dive into the docs. If you’re interested in access to enriched datasets, get in touch with us — we’d love to hear what you’re building.

Would you like me to make this more developer-focused (code snippets, API response examples with enriched fields), or more business-facing (highlighting use cases, ROI, enterprise value)?

We're excited to share a new open-source demo that showcases the power and simplicity of the Overture Maps API: the World Places Demo. This interactive map application demonstrates how developers can quickly build location-aware applications using our comprehensive places dataset.

https://Demo.Overturemapsapi.com​

What We Built​

The Overture Maps World Places Demo is a full-featured mapping application that lets users explore millions of places worldwide. Built with modern web technologies (Next.js 14, TypeScript, and MapLibre GL JS), it provides an intuitive interface for discovering restaurants, shops, pharmacies, and other points of interest anywhere on Earth.

Overture Maps World Places Demo

Key Features That Showcase Our API​

• Smart Filtering: Users can filter by categories (food, retail, healthcare, etc.) and specific brands, with results updating dynamically based on location and context.

• Real-time Search: The app automatically searches for places as users move the map, or they can manually trigger searches with customizable radius and result limits.

• Rich Place Data: Each place includes detailed information like confidence scores, addresses, categories, and brand affiliations—all sourced from Overture's high-quality dataset.

• Developer-Friendly: The codebase demonstrates best practices for API integration, including proper error handling, TypeScript support, and flexible schema validation.

API Design Highlights​

The demo showcases our API's developer-friendly design:

• Clean JSON Format: We've moved to a cleaner JSON response format that's easier to work with than traditional GeoJSON:

• Flexible Parameters: Search by location, radius, categories, brands, and more—all with sensible defaults and clear documentation.

• Built for Scale: Support for up to 25,000 results per query with efficient filtering and pagination.

Try It Yourself​

Ready to explore? Visit the live demo and start discovering places around the world. The application defaults to showing pharmacies near New York City, but you can explore any location and category combination.

For Developers: Clone the GitHub repository to see how we built it. The codebase includes:

• Complete TypeScript definitions for all API responses
• Zod schema validation for type safety
• Error handling best practices
• Responsive design patterns

Get Started with Overture Maps API​

Want to build your own location-aware application? Getting started is simple:

1. Get your free API key at account.overturemapsapi.com
2. Explore our endpoints: Places search, categories, brands, and countries
3. Check the documentation and use our demo as a reference implementation

Whether you're building a store locator, travel app, or business intelligence tool, the Overture Maps API provides the comprehensive, high-quality places data you need—with a developer experience designed for modern applications.

Start exploring at overturemapsapi.com and see what you can build!

First version contains these endpoints:

• ./places
• ./places/countries
• ./places/brands
• ./places/categories

Guides:

• Deploying to GCP
• Installing the Auth API to manage API Keys for your users

We will be adding more endpoints and documentation over the coming weeks.

This continues our mission to use APIs to make datasets widely available to developers, and to help them build amazing things with them that we started years ago with the Cat API which together with it's sister site the Dog API has helped millions of developers access and use pet data in their projects. We hope that the Overture Maps API will be just as successful and help developers build amazing things with GeoSpatial data.

https://thecatapi.com