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• Created by Teun Hendriks 

Short Summary Answer

GERS is a Global Entity Referencing System that assigns stable, long‑lived identifiers to real‑world transportation entities, such as road segments. It enables consistent matching and integration of geospatial data across different digital maps and versions, reduces fragmentation caused by map updates, and supports interoperable data layering across systems and providers. GERS is developed and governed within the Overture Maps Foundation, where it is used to provide stable entity identifiers for Overture’s open transportation datasets. GERS is designed to be map‑agnostic and reusable beyond Overture: the identifiers can be associated with equivalent entities in other digital maps, allowing datasets referenced via GERS to be exchanged, compared, or integrated across different map ecosystems.

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• GERS complements, rather than replaces, dynamic location referencing methods such as OpenLR (see also [TISA-LR-OpenLR-FAQ1] - Why is OpenLR the right location referencing method for us?).
• GERS is best used as a foundational reference layer for storing and integrating geospatial data.
• External datasets should be matched to GERS IDs using dedicated matching tools.
• Attribute changes should be modeled using linear referencing where possible.

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