Simon Willison’s Weblog

A POI Database in One Line (via) Overture maps offer an extraordinarily useful freely licensed databases of POI (point of interest) listings, principally derived from partners such as Facebook and including restaurants, shops, museums and other locations from all around the world.

Their new "overturemaps" Python CLI utility makes it easy to quickly pull subsets of their data... but requires you to provide a bounding box to do so.

Drew Breunig came up with this delightful recipe for fetching data using LLM and gpt-3.5-turbo to fill in those bounding boxes:

overturemaps download --bbox=$(llm 'Give me a bounding box for Alameda, California expressed as only four numbers delineated by commas, with no spaces, longitude preceding latitude.') -f geojsonseq --type=place | geojson-to-sqlite alameda.db places - --nl --pk=id