Articles & News
Deep dives on open geospatial data, API design, and building map-powered applications.
Geospatial MCP Server: Give AI Agents Live OpenStreetMap Data
Ask an agent for the nearest pharmacy and it invents a street. Give it live OpenStreetMap and it looks the place up, checks hours, and walks the real network. How the MapLark MCP server does that.
Places API: Nearby Cafes, Restaurants, Pharmacies, and Opening Hours
Search nearby cafes, restaurants, pharmacies, ATMs, EV chargers, schools, and hospitals on OSM tags. Opening hours, nearest-first rank, and a live playground.
How to get building heights and calculate shadows from OpenStreetMap
You cannot tell if a terrace gets sun from a basemap. Vector tiles clip footprints and drop height tags. Fetch full OSM polygons, derive height from tags, then compute shadows.
How is the Features API different from Vector Tiles?
Vector tiles and the OSM Features API solve different problems. Tiles render a basemap fast; the Features API returns full OSM tags and unclipped geometry so you can query and compute on the map, not just draw it.
Building the New OSM Features API: A Planet-Scale Overpass Alternative
How we built a production OSM Features API on PostGIS: scaling the import to the full planet, the 1.5 TB storage footprint, the indexes that make popular-tag queries fast, and real measured performance against public Overpass.