This dataset contains Point of Interest (POI) data for the United Kingdom, obtained from the Overture Maps Foundation. While the Overture Maps Foundation provides a series of global datasets, this CDRC data product provides users with easy access, without having to query the AWS hosted data that Overture Maps Foundation provide. In addition to the POI and location data, this CDRC data product has also appended numerous UK census geographies, and an H3 spatial index.

This new data product offers an openly available source of location data, capturing a broad variety of POI which can be used to support research over a variety of different domains and thematic areas including health, urban mobility, retail, transport and many more.

We have provided these data as a geopackage.

Content and Size of the Data

These data are provided at POI level.

The POIs were provided to Overture Maps Foundation by Meta and Microsoft, providing a 'name', 'category', and location. For detailed description of the columns contained within the data, see the Variable Dictionary; and for an overview of the characteristics of the data, see the Data Summary. These files can be downloaded from the bottom of this page.

Quality, Representation and Bias

This data product has been subject to academic peer review, with a published paper available here. In this, elements of the data were externally validated against the Geolytix supermarket retail points dataset. Validation revealed that our data product were well aligned with the Geolytix data, having a similar number of POIs across a subset of major supermarket retailers in the Geolytix dataset. Validation also identified that our data product exhibit good locational accuracy, through consideration of the average distance between points in both the Geolytix dataset and our data product.

However, there are some additional considerations to flag for users wanting to use this dataset. Users should be cautious of utilising POIs sourced entirely from Microsoft, as these often exhibit high levels of attribute incompleteness. Furthermore, there is a need for further research to validate the wider completeness and accuracy of our data product, particularly in relation to representation and bias.