Resources
Geospatial glossary
Plain-language definitions of the terms you’ll meet across the platform.
- Basemap
- The underlying map of roads, land, water and labels that your own data is drawn on top of.
- Vector tile (MVT)
- A tile that contains geometry and attributes rather than a picture, so it can be styled and interacted with in the browser. Airfree serves Mapbox Vector Tiles.
- Raster tile
- A tile delivered as a pre-rendered image (e.g. PNG). Simpler to display but not restyleable client-side.
- XYZ tiles
- The common tiling scheme addressing tiles by zoom (z) and column/row (x/y) — e.g. /{z}/{x}/{y}.
- Geocoding
- Turning a text address or place name into coordinates (longitude/latitude).
- Reverse geocoding
- The opposite — turning coordinates into the nearest address or place.
- Autocomplete
- Type-ahead suggestions returned as a user types part of an address or place.
- Routing
- Computing a path between locations, with distance, duration and turn-by-turn steps.
- Matrix
- A table of travel times/distances between many origins and destinations; billed per origin×destination element.
- Isochrone
- The area reachable within a given travel time or distance from a point.
- Static map
- A single map image produced server-side from a URL — no JavaScript needed to display it.
- Style
- A JSON document (MapLibre/Mapbox style spec) describing how a vector basemap is drawn: colours, fonts, layers.
- Glyphs & sprites
- The font glyphs and icon images a style references to render labels and symbols.
- EPSG:4326 / WGS84
- The default geographic coordinate system — longitude/latitude in degrees — used by the APIs.
- GeoJSON
- A common JSON format for encoding geographic features (points, lines, polygons) and their properties.
- Attribution
- The credit you must display for the data you use — for Airfree Maps, “© OpenStreetMap contributors”.
- ODbL
- The Open Database License that governs OpenStreetMap data: use it freely, but attribute it and share-alike derivative databases.
- Share-alike
- An ODbL obligation: if you build a derivative database from the data, you must license that database under the ODbL too.
- Produced work
- A rendered output (such as a map image) made from the data — needs attribution, but not share-alike.
- Tileserver
- The service that stores and serves map tiles and styles to clients.