Overture Maps Foundation
Overture Maps Foundation was set up in 2022 by Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, and TomTom to produce shared, high-quality map data that anyone can use. Rather than building a new map from scratch, Overture blends existing open and contributed sources, cleans them, and publishes them under a single, stable schema so different layers fit together predictably.
The data is organised into themes such as places (points of interest), buildings, transportation, administrative divisions, and base layers. Each feature carries a global entity reference, which makes it easier to match and update records across releases. Overture publishes in GeoParquet, a columnar format that works well with cloud data tools, and you can query it directly on AWS and Azure or download it in bulk.
For RAG, Overture is a good choice when you want clean, consistently structured geographic data without stitching together multiple raw sources yourself. Its places theme is especially useful for building a knowledge base of businesses and points of interest.
Related sources
GeoNames
A geographical database of more than 11 million place names, each with coordinates, population, elevation, and administrative divisions, covering every country. It works well as a gazetteer for resolving place names to locations.
Natural Earth
A public domain map dataset built for cartography, offered at three scales: 1:10m, 1:50m, and 1:110m. It bundles cultural data (borders, cities, roads), physical data (coastlines, rivers, lakes), and raster imagery, all ready to drop into a map.
OpenStreetMap
A crowdsourced map of the world, built and maintained by a community of volunteers. It holds detailed geographic data on roads, buildings, land use, points of interest, and much more, which you can download as a full planet file or as smaller regional extracts.