# Overture Maps: where the businesses we count come from Source: // State of the web: sources Every state of the web report starts from a list of businesses: restaurants, shops, offices, lodging. That list comes from Overture Maps, an open dataset of map data. Here we explain what it is, why it exists, where its data comes from, and why we chose it after trying OpenStreetMap. [What Overture Maps is](#what-it-is) [Why it exists](#why-it-exists) [Where the data comes from](#sources) [Our first attempt: OpenStreetMap](#openstreetmap) [How we use it in the scans](#how-we-use-it) ## What Overture Maps is Overture Maps is a project of the Overture Maps Foundation, founded in December 2022 by Amazon Web Services, Meta, Microsoft and TomTom under the Linux Foundation, and since joined by many other members. It publishes open, free map data, ready to use in a map, an app, or an analysis like ours. The data is split into themes: - **Places**: businesses and points of interest, with name, category, address, phone and website. - **Buildings**: the footprint, and often the height, of buildings. - **Transportation**: roads, paths and railways. - **Divisions**: administrative boundaries, from municipalities to countries. - **Addresses and base**: street numbers, land, water and land use. ## Why it exists A reliable map is very expensive to build and to keep up to date, and for years every company redid the same work on its own. Overture exists to share that work: an open base of data, with one documented schema, that anyone can use and that companies can build their own services on. Its stated goal is to merge several sources into one dataset, check its quality, and publish it in regular releases, so that anyone using it always knows which version they have. ## Where the data comes from Overture does not collect data in the field: it merges different sources, compares them and removes duplicates. Its sources include OpenStreetMap, data contributed by its members (for places mostly Meta and Microsoft, for roads also TomTom), buildings derived from satellite imagery, and open government datasets, such as addresses. Each place carries the sources it comes from and a confidence score, which says how likely it is that the business really exists there. The data is published under open licenses (CDLA Permissive 2.0 for places, ODbL for the themes that contain OpenStreetMap data) and can be downloaded freely. ## Our first attempt: OpenStreetMap We built our first scans on OpenStreetMap, the free map maintained by volunteers around the world. For roads, paths, buildings and navigation it is excellent, often more detailed than commercial maps. For businesses, though, the data goes stale. A shop that closed years ago stays on the map until a local volunteer notices, and the same goes for opening hours, phone numbers and above all website addresses: on many entries the website was gone, had changed, or had never been added. For a scan that starts from the website each business lists, that was the weakest point. Overture handles this problem much better, because it merges several sources, including the listings businesses keep up to date themselves on its members' platforms, and compares them. That is why, since then, the state of the web scans count businesses from Overture Maps. ### OpenStreetMap - Maintained by hand by volunteers - Excellent for roads, buildings and navigation - Businesses updated only when someone nearby fixes them - Websites often old or missing on entries ### Overture Maps - Several sources merged and compared - A confidence score for every place - Regular releases, with recognizable versions - Websites more often present and up to date ## How we use it in the scans For each city we take the administrative boundaries from the divisions theme and the businesses from the places theme: we count the ones whose point falls within the boundaries, after leaving out the categories that are not relevant to an online presence. Each business's website is the one listed on its Overture entry, and every check starts from there. It remains a list of businesses found on a map, not the official business register: a business without an entry does not appear, and an entry with an old website leads to a site that does not open. That is also why the reports tell the businesses that list a website apart from those that have a working one. [How we measure: the full method](https://www.nfw.run/state-of-the-web/method) // frequently asked questions ## Overture Maps, in short ### Is Overture Maps free? Yes. The data can be downloaded freely and used for commercial purposes too, under each theme's license: CDLA Permissive 2.0 for places, ODbL for the themes that contain OpenStreetMap data, which asks you to credit the source. ### Why don't you use Google Maps data? Because it is not open data: Google's terms do not allow downloading business listings in bulk and analyzing them. Overture is built precisely to be downloaded and reused, which makes our figures repeatable by anyone. ### Is OpenStreetMap wrong? No. It is one of the best maps in the world for roads, paths and buildings, and part of Overture's data comes from it; the background map of our reports uses OpenStreetMap data too. The limit we found concerns only business entries, and in particular their websites, which go stale faster than volunteers can update them. ### How up to date is the data? Overture publishes a new release on a regular schedule, and each scan starts from a recent release. Some time can still pass between a business closing and it disappearing from the dataset, as with any map. ### My business is missing or has wrong details: what can I do? Update the business's listing on the platforms Overture collects places from, such as the business's Facebook page or Bing Places for Business, and on OpenStreetMap too if you like. Corrections usually reach Overture in the following releases, and from there our next scan. ### Does Overture Maps replace the business register? No. The business register lists registered companies, Overture the businesses you find on a map. To understand what a customer searching online finds, it is the right source; to count a territory's companies in a statistical sense, it is not. ## The official site Documentation, the data schema, releases and the foundation's members are on the project's site. [Go to overturemaps.org](https://overturemaps.org) [Back to the state of the web](https://www.nfw.run/state-of-the-web)