The Overture Maps Foundation (OMF) announces the launch of its Global Entity Reference System (GERS). The addition of GERS IDs to features in OMF’s datasets is meant to make data integration and augmentation (where additional data is added or joined to geospatial entities) easier:
GERS IDs are a defining characteristic of Overture’s open map datasets. Each “entity” in the base maps carries a unique ID, including 2.6 billion buildings, 64 million places, nearly 447 million addresses, and 321 million road segments. (…) By incorporating GERS IDs into any data that needs to be associated with those base layers, users can easily combine relevant data to build richer applications.
There are several articles that may be interesting with respect to this:
- the article with the announcement,
- an article explaining the GER system, and
- an article explaining “bridge files” that allow linking OMF input datasets1 to the resulting data through GERS.
Footnotes
such as OpenStreetMap, Esri, Microsoft and other data↩︎