The Overture Maps Foundation is prioritizing the elimination of the geospatial industry’s longstanding “conflation tax” in 2026, aiming to slash the costly process of cleaning and matching external data sources that has long hindered innovation, said new Executive Director William “Will” Mortenson.
“Our priority for 2026 is simple: declaring an end to the industry’s ‘conflation tax,’” Mortenson said. “For decades, organizations have spent more money cleaning and matching external data than they spent licensing it. That is a tax on innovation.” He emphasized that with the General Availability of the Global Entity Reference System (GERS) this year, Overture is providing the “connective tissue” for a geospatial web, positioning GERS as a universal “fingerprint” for physical places to enable rapid merging of datasets. “The most important topic in the map world isn’t just coverage anymore…it is interoperability,” said Mortenson, who joined Overture in November.
Mortenson acknowledged the organization’s retiring leader Marc Prioleau’s view that “making maps is incredibly hard,” noting that Overture is addressing this by creating shared reference layers from open sources like OpenStreetMap, governments and corporations. “Overture’s goal is to build reference data once, as a shared asset,” he said. “This reduces the redundancy that has plagued our industry for years and allows our members to focus their resources on the proprietary layers that actually differentiate their products.”
On membership growth, Mortenson said Overture has moved beyond initial interest from established companies, or what he calls the ‘kicking the tires’ stage, citing production adoption as evidence of progress. “The industry is waking up to the reality that the base map is a shared utility, not a competitive moat,” he said, pointing to Meta’s META 0.88%↑ transition of global basemaps for Facebook and Instagram to Overture data, Esri’s integration into its Living Atlas, and TomTom’s use in its Orbis platform. “Since the availability of our data sets and the introduction of GERS in July 2025, we see the rate of adoption increasing,” Mortenson said.
