Places Finder: Open Data (Overture Maps + OpenStreetMap)

Find businesses and places by category and city, using only open, legally licensed data. Give it a category (restaurant, dentist, plumber, cafe...) and a city, bounding box or radius. It returns name, category, address, coordinates, phone, website and email when an open source lists them, plus the source, license, attribution and source ID of every row.

No Google, no Apple, no scraping of any website, no API key, no proxy. Data comes from:

• Overture Maps Places, read directly from Overture's public GeoParquet files on S3 with DuckDB (license: CDLA-Permissive-2.0; some contributing datasets are Apache-2.0 or CC0).
• OpenStreetMap, through the public Overpass API (license: ODbL 1.0; the Actor sends a descriptive User-Agent, makes one query per run and backs off when the server is busy).
• Nominatim (OpenStreetMap) to turn a place name into an area: one request per run.

What is different about this Actor

• Both sources in one run, merged. The same cafe often exists in both datasets with different gaps (one has the phone, the other the opening hours). Matching places (similar name within about 120 m) become one row with missing fields filled in; the row says which fields came from where (filledFromOtherSource) and lists every source ID.
• License and attribution on every row, not just in the README. Pick dataSource: overture if you need to avoid ODbL share-alike data.
• Real city boundaries. A named city is searched inside its actual boundary polygon, not a loose rectangle, so "Boston" does not return half of Cambridge.
• Survives Overpass outages. The public Overpass server is often at capacity. The Actor retries with backoff, tries public mirrors, and if OpenStreetMap stays unavailable it still returns the Overture results with a warning.
• Plain-word categories (about 70 built in, with synonyms) that work in both datasets, plus raw OSM tags / Overture categories for anything else.

Input

Field	What it does
category	Plain word: restaurant, cafe, dentist, plumber, electrician, lawyer, pharmacy, hair salon, gym, hotel, car repair... Unknown words are tried as raw OSM tag values / Overture categories.
location	City, town or district, e.g. Boston, Massachusetts, USA.
boundingBox	{south, west, north, east} in degrees. Overrides location.
latitude, longitude, radiusMeters	Circle search. With location plus radiusMeters, the circle is centred on the place.
maxResults	Default 50, up to 1000.
dataSource	both (default), overture, or osm.
mergeDuplicates	Merge the same place found in both sources (default on).
onlyWithPhone, onlyWithWebsite, onlyWithEmail	Drop rows where no open source has that field.
sortBy	Which places to keep when there are more than maxResults: most complete contact data first (default) or name A-Z.
minOvertureConfidence	Overture's 0-1 score that a place exists (default 0.5). It is not a quality rating.
osmTags, overtureCategories, overtureRelease	Advanced: extra filters like craft=plumber / plumbing, and pinning an Overture release.

The search area is limited to about 2 square degrees (a large metro area). This is a city/district tool, not a country-wide extractor.

Output

{
  "name": "Bonne Chance Cafe",
  "category": "cafe",
  "categoryRaw": "cafe | amenity=cafe",
  "address": "77 Canal St, Boston, MA 02114",
  "latitude": 42.3642025,
  "longitude": -71.0596237,
  "phone": "+16177423115",
  "website": "http://www.bonnechancecafe77.com/",
  "email": "bonnechancecafe77@gmail.com",
  "source": "overture+openstreetmap",
  "license": "CDLA-Permissive-2.0 + ODbL-1.0",
  "attribution": "Overture Maps Foundation, overturemaps.org; ...; © OpenStreetMap contributors, ODbL 1.0 (https://www.openstreetmap.org/copyright)",
  "sourceId": "overture:dee1c7a7-9e94-4207-a724-7e9280b03ce0",
  "sourceIds": ["overture:dee1c7a7-9e94-4207-a724-7e9280b03ce0", "osm:node/4840220309"],
  "sourceUrl": "https://www.openstreetmap.org/node/4840220309",
  "retrievedAt": "2026-10-26T02:42:01Z"
}

See sample-output.json for real rows. Other fields: street, city, region, postcode, country, openingHours (OSM only), overtureConfidence, contributingDatasets, filledFromOtherSource, searchArea. The Places view in the Output tab shows the main columns; export as JSON, CSV or Excel. A run summary (search area, Overture release, candidate counts, warnings, attribution text) is stored in the key-value store under SUMMARY.

Honest limits

• No reviews, no ratings, no photos, no popularity data. Open data does not have them. overtureConfidence only says how likely the place exists.
• Coverage varies a lot by region. Overture is strongest in North America and Western Europe; OpenStreetMap is strongest where volunteers are active. Phone, website and especially email are often missing (email is rare). Some places are closed or out of date. Always verify before you pitch or ship anything.
• Category matching is approximate. Overture and OpenStreetMap classify things differently, and the built-in words are a convenience mapping, not a perfect one.
• Result caps. The Actor fetches a limited number of candidates per source before ranking (at least 200, five times maxResults, at most 5000). In dense areas with a small maxResults, you may not see every match; a warning appears in SUMMARY. OpenStreetMap candidates beyond the cap are chosen by the Overpass server, not ranked.
• Overpass is a shared community service and can be busy; a run may take a few minutes when it is. Please do not schedule it hundreds of times per hour.

Licenses and attribution (please read)

• Rows with source overture: CDLA-Permissive-2.0 (Overture Maps Foundation). Credit "Overture Maps Foundation, overturemaps.org". Some contributing datasets (e.g. Foursquare, Apache-2.0) carry their own notices; see https://docs.overturemaps.org/attribution/.
• Rows with source containing openstreetmap: © OpenStreetMap contributors, ODbL 1.0. You must attribute OpenStreetMap, and if you build and publish a database from the data, ODbL share-alike applies to it. Merged rows contain OSM data and are treated as ODbL-derived. If that does not suit you, use dataSource: overture.
• This Actor does not give legal advice; check the licenses for your use case. It is not affiliated with Overture Maps Foundation or the OpenStreetMap Foundation.
• Contact data (phones, emails) in open datasets can be personal data for some sole traders. Follow the marketing, privacy and anti-spam rules (GDPR, CAN-SPAM, TCPA...) that apply to you.

Use cases

Local lead lists, market and competitor mapping, store-locator and GIS enrichment, "who offers X in this town" lookups for AI agents (call it through the Apify MCP server), and research where license clarity matters.