MapIt is an open source project to help people run 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.
It was created in 2003 by mySociety, a UK charity, for use by their various tools needing admin area lookup.
MapIt can be installed as a Django app, or as a standalone server. For full details, please see our site at http://code.mapit.mysociety.org/ for help and documentation.
Mapit Africa (mapit.hurumap.org) uses the django app project to host administrative areas geographical boundaries and maps geographical points for more than 10 African countries.
We use docker-based environment for development and deployment. Refer to the docker-compose.yml file.
To get started, clone this repository and spin up docker-containers as shown below.
- git clone git@github.com:CodeforAfrica/mapit.git
- cd mapit
- docker-compose up
Once containers are up, visit http:localhost:8000
Countries' geofiles are available in the folder geo. The file import.md has steps on how to import MapIt data. Make sure you're on the web container bash to run import commands.
Use MAPIT API documentation displayed on landing page to understand the web services.
mySociety 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. For details of what constitutes "low-volume", and for commercial licensing arrangements, please consult MapIt pricing .
Usage is rate limited by default; clients may be rate limited by IP address or by a User Token passed in the User-Agent: header. Clients may be excluded from the effects of rate limiting via the RATE_LIMIT option in the configuration file.