Overture Member Summit 2026

Let's dig into the Overture Place Categories taxonomy, covering its history, evolution, and plans for ongoing governance. We'll explain how the taxonomy is organized, introduce the concept of "basic level categories", and describe some of the ways the taxonomy can be used.

The Overture Places theme is focused on points of interest (POI)--real-world entities such as hospitals, museums, parks, and schools. A core component of the Places theme is a taxonomy of about 2000 categories, organized into a hierarchy to facilitate exploration and discovery.

The taxonomy has been significantly updated in recent months to improve ease of use, provide greater interoperability between different systems and platforms, and optimize the accuracy and coverage of POI classifiers. In addition to overhauling the taxonomy, we introduced the notion of "basic level categories"--a subset of Place Categories used for generalization and industry alignment. There are a wide range of user-facing and backend use cases for the taxonomy, ranging from labeling and iconography in mapping interfaces to AI-assisted data ingestion and classification.