Welcome to MapIt

MapIt is a web service that maps geographical points to administrative areas. It is useful for anyone who has the co-ordinates of a point on Earth, and who needs to find out what country, region, city, constituency, or state it lies within. It’s also great for looking up the shapes of all those boundaries.

This site is about how to install your own copy of MapIt on your own server, and how to import data into it. mySociety (the UK charity that wrote this code) runs public installations of MapIt that you might be able to use:

• MapIt Global – global boundaries from the OpenStreetMap project.
• MapIt UK – UK boundaries from various sources.

The above are free for non-commercial, low-volume use.

Technical Overview

The mapit directory contains a standard Django app, and the project directory contains an example GeoDjango project using that app. Other top-level things are mostly to fit within mySociety’s standard deployment, or country specific data, one-off scripts and so on.

MapIt has been installed on Debian and Ubuntu. If GeoDjango and PostGIS run on it, it should theoretically be okay; do let us know of any problems.

Installation

MapIt can be installed as a Django app, or as a standalone server. For full details, see the installation documentation.

Importing data

There are various ways to import data into MapIt, ranging from manually to importing KML files. We have also supplied notes for some of the countries that MapIt has been set up for; see the links in the navigation.

Contact

Improvements, patches, questions and comments are all welcome. The code is hosted on GitHub and we use their bug tracker too, so please open a ticket there:

• GitHub home: https://github.com/mysociety/mapit
• GitHub issues: https://github.com/mysociety/mapit/issues