Places & enrichment
When you pick a search result, tap a marker, or long-press a point on the map, OpenMapX opens a place panel — the card on the side of the map that tells you what a place is, when it's open, how to reach it, and what others have said. The panel starts from a single resolved place (a name, a category, and a set of coordinates) and layers open data on top of it: an encyclopedia summary, structured facts, geotagged photos, opening hours, sun and weather readouts, and a path straight into directions or transit.
Nothing here depends on one proprietary place database. The address and core attributes come from your geocoder and OpenStreetMap; everything else is contributed by enrichment integrations you can enable, disable, or swap independently. A place still resolves and displays with none of them — you simply get less context.
What a place card shows
The panel is organized into tabs across the top, with the most useful information up front on the Overview tab.
The header carries the place name, a category chip (restaurant, park, museum, airport, …), and — when reviews exist — a star rating and review count. If the place has photos, a hero image sits above the header with a View photos affordance that opens the full gallery. Cities and smaller administrative areas get a compact local-time and weather readout in the header instead of a photo.
Below the header, a row of round action buttons is always present:
| Action | What it does |
|---|---|
| Directions | Sets this place as the destination and opens the directions panel |
| Save | Adds the place to one of your saved lists (sign-in required) |
| Nearby | Opens the Explore box centered on this place to find what's around it |
| Share | Copies a deep link to the place (uses the native share sheet where available) |
The Overview tab
Overview is a stack of detail rows, each self-hiding when it has nothing to show:
- Address — the formatted street address, with a one-tap copy button.
- Plus Code — an Open Location Code for the exact point, shortened against the nearest city and linking out to plus.codes.
- Opening hours — parsed from OpenStreetMap's
opening_hours, shown as an open / closed status with the next change, and expandable to the full week schedule with today highlighted. - Phone and Website — tap-to-call and click-through links, each copyable.
- Wikipedia — a link to the article when the place is linked to one.
- Add a label — tag the place as Home, Work, or a custom name for fast recall.
- Weather, Sunrise & sunset, and (on the coast) Tides and Marine weather — expandable readouts for the place's exact location.
Restaurants surface a menu and food-delivery hand-off, and hotels surface a price-and-booking row and a dedicated Prices tab; both rows stay hidden for places they don't apply to. Below the rows, the Overview tab also folds in specialized sections when the place warrants them — a transit section for a place with linked stops (feeding into public transit), data-source detail (such as EV-charging connectors, see mobility data), airport detail (runways, frequencies, navaids), and harbor facilities for nautical points.
The Reviews tab
Reviews aggregates ratings and written reviews for the place and lets signed-in users write their own. The full mechanics — the open Mangrove review store, browser-side signing, and how a place is matched to its reviews — are covered on the Reviews page.
The Info tab
Info is the deeper reference view. It leads with a longer description (the Wikipedia summary when available, the Wikidata description otherwise), then a grid of About this place facts, structured attribute groups read from OpenStreetMap tags (accessibility, payment methods, service options, diet, internet access, recycling, and so on), and a list of external references — the place's IDs on Wikidata, OpenStreetMap, and other registries, each linking out. Every block credits its source inline.
How enrichment works
A resolved place is enriched the same way no matter how it was found. The API runs every enabled knowledge integration in parallel against the place's OpenStreetMap tags and coordinates, then merges the results into one place object: scalar fields (description, Wikipedia link) take the first non-empty answer, while facts and photos from all sources are concatenated and deduplicated. Any source that errors or times out is silently dropped, so enrichment degrades gracefully rather than blocking the panel.
Knowledge integrations
These add the context behind the core place data. Each is an independent plugin
in the knowledge domain.
| Integration | Contributes | Source license |
|---|---|---|
knowledge-wikipedia | The article summary shown on Info, plus the Wikipedia link and Commons images | CC BY-SA / GFDL |
knowledge-wikidata | The "About this place" structured facts and a fallback description | CC0 |
knowledge-sunrise-sunset | Sunrise, sunset, and day-length for the place's exact coordinates | Free with attribution |
A place is matched to Wikipedia and Wikidata through its OSM wikipedia and
wikidata tags (and the geocoder fills these in where it can), so the encyclopedia
content lines up with the right entity rather than a name guess.
The same panel can surface a few more location readouts that are documented on their own pages, since they're really weather data: current conditions, tides near a coast, and marine (wave) weather all appear as expandable rows when relevant. See Weather for those sources.
Photo integrations
Geotagged imagery comes from a separate set of plugins in the photos domain. A
single request fans out to every enabled photo provider — some matched by the
place's OSM tags (image, wikidata, wikimedia_commons), others by a
geo-search around the coordinates — and the results are merged and deduplicated
into one gallery. Street-level imagery providers are sorted last, after editorial
photos.
| Integration | Source | Notes |
|---|---|---|
photos | OSM image= tags, Google Photos previews | The base provider; resolves image tags and link previews |
photos-wikimedia | Wikimedia Commons | Tag-linked and geo-searched Commons photos |
photos-flickr | Flickr | Geotagged photos (needs a Flickr API key) |
photos-panoramax | Panoramax | Open street-level imagery (sorted after editorial photos) |
photos-mapillary | Mapillary | Street-level imagery (sorted last; needs an access token) |
Each photo carries its own attribution, shown in the gallery, and the OSM
image= tag always takes priority as the place's primary picture. The same
Mapillary and Panoramax coverage also powers the immersive viewer described under
Street-level imagery.
Like the rest of OpenMapX, enrichment requests run through your own server — Wikipedia, Wikidata, Flickr, and the rest see your server's address, not your users'. Images are fetched through an image proxy on the same server.
Configuring enrichment
Enrichment integrations are managed from the admin panel, the same way as any other integration. Enable only the sources you want; the place panel adapts to whatever is running. A few providers need credentials — Flickr an API key, Mapillary an access token — which live in the integration's config alongside its enabled toggle. The knowledge and Commons providers call public APIs and need no key.
Because results are merged rather than ranked into a single winner, enabling more sources generally means richer cards: Wikipedia plus Wikidata plus several photo providers all contribute at once, while each stays optional. For the underlying plugin model and how integrations resolve against backend services, see How it works.
Related features
- Search & autocomplete — how a place is found and resolved before the panel opens, including category and POI search.
- Directions — the Directions action drops you into route planning with this place as the destination.
- Public transit — the transit section of a place with linked stops, and stop detail panels.
- Reviews — the Reviews tab, ratings, and writing reviews.
- Street-level imagery — the Mapillary and Panoramax viewer that the photo providers also feed.
- Mobility data — the data-source detail sections for EV charging, parking, and shared-mobility points.