About Open Map Lab
An independent, browser-computed suite of geographic micro-tools built for speed, privacy and accuracy. Location calculations run in your browser; the site uses Google Analytics for anonymous page statistics (see the privacy policy).
Our Mission
Every day, millions of people search for simple geographic answers: "What county am I in?", "What time zone am I in?", "What is my elevation?", or "What is the distance between these two places?".
Unfortunately, most search results lead to websites built twenty years ago that have deteriorated into slow, ad-choked traps. Worse, many rely on coarse, server-side IP geolocation that can misidentify your city by tens or hundreds of miles, while secretly logging your location for commercial data brokers.
Open Map Lab was built to prove that everyday cartographic tools can be clean, fast, and respectful:
- Direct Answer First: Every tool delivers the answer in the first viewport with zero required scrolling or clicks.
- Privacy by Architecture: Spatial point-in-polygon tests and WGS84 geodesic calculations execute locally on your device in your browser. Open Map Lab keeps no database of user coordinates, and the site runs no ads. Page analytics are described in the privacy policy.
- Rigorous Mathematical Provenance: We compute geodesics using Karney’s exact ellipsoidal solution on the WGS84 spheroid rather than naive spherical shortcuts, and cite primary government sources and datasets openly.
Who Builds Open Map Lab
Open Map Lab is developed and maintained by an independent group of software engineers, cartographers, and computational geometry specialists. We started Open Map Lab to build the cartographic utility suite we always wanted as an everyday reference tool: fast, unbloated, mathematically exact, and respectful of user privacy.
We do not claim affiliation with any government agency, national geodetic survey, or academic department. Open Map Lab is an independently operated web application built on open web standards (Next.js, MapLibre GL, TypeScript) and public domain datasets.
Authors: the tool pages and the original blog guides are written and edited by Marko Visic, geospatial writer & editor. The newer blog posts are written by Manolis Tzortzakis. Each author page lists that author's posts and links to their LinkedIn profile.
AI Assistance & Verification Disclosure
In the spirit of modern engineering transparency: we use artificial intelligence tools (such as large language models and code-generation agents) to assist with software drafting, styling, test generation, and editorial drafting.
However, all algorithmic logic, mathematical formulas, boundary datasets, and factual claims are strictly audited, reviewed, and verified by human hands before deployment. We never let AI models fabricate citations, invent legal rulings, or guess coordinate boundaries.
Domain: openmaplab.com · Inquiries & Feedback: [email protected]