Overture POI data for the United Kingdom: a comprehensive, queryable open data product

TL;DR

This paper presents a processed, fully-queryable version of the Overture POI dataset for the UK, making it accessible for researchers and enabling new spatial analyses.

Contribution

It provides a ready-to-use, open-access POI dataset for the UK, including code for exploration and subset generation, addressing accessibility issues.

Findings

Dataset has high locational accuracy

Attribute data is comprehensive

Compared favorably with Geolytix supermarket data

Abstract

Point of Interest data that is comprehensive, globally-available and open-access, is sparse, despite being important inputs for research in a number of application areas. New data from the Overture Maps Foundation offers significant potential in this arena, but accessing the data relies on computational resources beyond the skillset and capacity of the average researcher. In this article, we provide a processed version of the Overture places (POI) dataset for the UK, in a fully-queryable format, and provide accompanying code through which to explore the data, and generate other national subsets. In the article, we describe the construction and characteristics of the dataset, before considering how reliable it is (locational accuracy, attribute comprehensiveness), through direct comparison with Geolytix supermarket data. This dataset can support new and important research projects in a variety of different thematic areas, and foster a network of researchers to further evaluate its advantages and limitations.