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Data Sources & Attribution

God's Eye View's code is MIT-licensed. The MIT grant covers the source code only — it does NOT extend to third-party data or visual assets. Every third-party source keeps its own license and terms. This file documents the live and bundled data sources; bundled 3D-model provenance is recorded in public/models/README.md.

How to read this:

The non-permissive datasets are carved out, not omitted. Some bundled data (e.g. TeleGeography, CC BY-NC-SA) isn't MIT-compatible. Rather than hide it, we bundle it with a clear license carve-out so the app works out of the box — but it stays under the provider's terms.
If your use doesn't fit a dataset's license, remove that dataset. Most importantly: TeleGeography is NonCommercial — commercial users must delete it (or license it from TeleGeography). It's one self-contained folder.
Attribution is shown in-app and listed here. Keep it intact. The required Google/Cesium credit renders on the on-globe credit line (bottom-left, #cesium-credits), and every per-layer credit below is registered into the expandable "Data attribution" lightbox on that line (src/data/dataCredits.js → viewer.creditDisplay.addStaticCredit). Both stay visible in clean-view and recording modes.
Bundled model attribution lives beside the model files. public/models/README.md records each shipped model's creator, source, license, and modification status.

Live sources (fetched at runtime — not stored in this repo)

Source	Used for	License / terms	Attribution
Google Map Tiles API (Photorealistic 3D Tiles) + Places/Geocoding	The 3D globe, voice scene context, and on-demand nearby installation search	Google Maps Platform ToS (proprietary, your own key + billing)	"Google" / "Google Maps" logo — shown in-app, required
OpenSky Network	Primary worldwide live-flight snapshot	Non-commercial research/education license	Schäfer et al., "Bringing Up OpenSky", IPSN 2014 + opensky-network.org
adsb.lol point API	Bounded live-flight fallback when OpenSky has no usable snapshot	ODbL 1.0	adsb.lol contributors; `api.adsb.lol/v2/lat/{lat}/lon/{lon}/dist/{radius}`
adsb.lol	Military flights + aircraft traces	ODbL 1.0	"adsb.lol" (ODbL)
AISStream.io	Live vessels (AIS)	Free, beta, no formal ToS; AIS is a public broadcast	"AISStream.io" (courtesy)
CelesTrak	Satellite TLEs (SGP4)	US-government-origin data, no license; citation requested	"CelesTrak (celestrak.org), Dr. T.S. Kelso"
The Space Devs — Launch Library 2 v2.3	Recent launch, payload, stage, and recovery metadata for Space Missions (30d)	The Space Devs terms of use: data may be used and shared in any form; avoid forwarding it without added value; attribution is encouraged (not mandatory). Official API limits: 15 unauthenticated calls/hour; optional token	"Launch Library 2 — The Space Devs" (courtesy attribution)
Esri World Imagery (ArcGIS Online tile service)	The keyless satellite basemap — the default landing when no Google/ion credential is configured, and the "Esri Satellite" map stack	Esri Master Agreement: the public World Imagery service is usable in public-facing apps with attribution; no key is required for this classic endpoint, but Esri governs and can change access — an app at scale should review current ArcGIS Location Platform terms	"Powered by Esri — Source: Esri, Maxar, Earthstar Geographics, and the GIS User Community" (provider carries the service's own credit line)
USGS	Earthquakes	U.S. public domain	"Data courtesy of the U.S. Geological Survey"
OpenStreetMap (Overpass API)	Road geometry for traffic	ODbL 1.0	"© OpenStreetMap contributors"
TomTom Traffic API (flow vector tiles)	Live congestion coloring for the traffic layer (optional, BYOK)	TomTom for Developers terms (proprietary, your own key; free tier currently 200K tile requests/month — see current pricing)	"Traffic flow data © TomTom" — registered when live mode activates
OpenStreetMap (Overpass API)	Viewport-bounded mapped installation context for Global Context	ODbL 1.0	"© OpenStreetMap contributors" (incomplete mapped context)
OpenStreetMap (Nominatim)	Reverse-geocoded place label in the cockpit Local Info page	ODbL 1.0 + Nominatim usage policy	"© OpenStreetMap contributors"
Open-Meteo	Current weather in the cockpit Local Info page and cockpit-local dynamic atmospheric effects	CC BY 4.0 data licence and adjacent-link attribution requirement	Linked "Weather data by Open-Meteo.com" beside the displayed local data
Google News RSS	Primary locality-matched headlines in the cockpit Regional News page	Google News Terms of Service restrict use to personal, noncommercial use; linked articles remain third-party publisher content and retain publisher terms	"Google News RSS" plus each article's linked publisher/domain
GDELT Project DOC 2.0	Fail-soft fallback for location-matched cockpit headlines	GDELT Terms of Use: unrestricted academic/commercial/governmental dataset use, with citation and link required; linked articles retain publisher terms	"GDELT Project" plus each article's linked publisher/domain
City of Austin Open Data	CCTV camera catalog + frames	City of Austin Open Data Terms of Use	"City of Austin, TX — data.austintexas.gov"
Caltrans (cwwp2.dot.ca.gov)	CCTV camera catalogs + frames, California districts	Public Caltrans traffic camera data	"Caltrans — cwwp2.dot.ca.gov" (courtesy)
TfL Open Data (JamCams)	CCTV camera catalog + frames, London	TfL Open Data terms — attribution REQUIRED	"Powered by TfL Open Data. Contains OS data © Crown copyright and database rights"
GBFS (Lyft / BCycle)	Bikeshare availability	Per-feed (attribution-only)	Credit the operator (e.g. Austin BCycle) + its `license_url`
Radio Browser	Geolocated internet-radio station directory and station-level tags	Public-domain directory data under PDDL 1.0; individual broadcaster stream terms apply	"Radio Browser" plus a link to the selected broadcaster
Re:Earth Terrain (Mapterhorn)	Terrain (keyless globe stacks — OSM etc. — + `/api/terrain/heights` ellipsoidal-height lookups)	Terrain mesh: CC BY 4.0; geoid: EGM2008 (NGA, public domain)	"Terrain (keyless globe stacks): Re:Earth Terrain / Mapterhorn (CC BY 4.0) / EGM2008 (NGA)"

Notes on the live sources

Google Maps Platform. You supply your own API key and are bound by Google's ToS. Google Maps Content (tiles, geocodes, places) may not be cached, stored, rehosted, or committed — this app only ever uses it live, which is the compliant pattern. The "Google" attribution is displayed on the globe and must stay visible. Restrict your key (see SECURITY.md).
OpenSky Network. Its license is non-commercial, and operational use of the REST API in a live product can require a prior written agreement with OpenSky — even for non-profit/government use. If you deploy this commercially, contact OpenSky for your own terms. The flights layer is a toggle and runs anonymously by default.
adsb.lol flight fallback. When OpenSky is unavailable and no last-good OpenSky response exists, the server requests a cached, capped 250 nm adsb.lol point snapshot around the current camera subpoint. This is regional observed context, not worldwide completeness; provenance is exposed in the Flights stats/context row. Military ICAOs remain reconciled through the existing dedicated military registry rather than duplicated.
Launch Library 2. /api/launches makes a server-side rolling-30-day query against the supported v2.3 detailed launch endpoint, caches successful responses for 15 minutes in memory and on disk, and serves the last successful response during a throttle or transient outage. Anonymous access is limited to 15 calls/hour; deployments can provide LL2_API_TOKEN for authenticated access. The Space Devs' published terms permit using and sharing the API data in any form, ask users not to forward it without adding value, disclaim complete accuracy, and encourage—but do not require—attribution. This app keeps a courtesy credit. Payload and stage/recovery records are shown only when supplied. Failed launches expose their source status and never receive fallback orbit geometry or a live/estimated marker. LL2 supplies launch context and event timing, not continuous ascent telemetry or live orbital state.
TfL JamCams. The camera list comes from the keyless api.tfl.gov.uk endpoint (an optional TFL_APP_KEY raises its rate limit); frames come from TfL's public S3 bucket. The "Powered by TfL Open Data" attribution is required by TfL's terms and is registered in the Data attribution popover.
Radio Browser. /api/radio/stations discovers official API mirrors, makes bounded and coalesced healthy/geolocated HTTPS-station queries, caches the normalized public-domain directory for 45 minutes, and may serve the last good catalog for up to seven days during an outage. Refreshes must meet minimum accepted-query and station coverage before replacing a warm catalog; schema-valid responses whose rows all fail the product's health policy do not count as successful queries. A usable partial cold catalog is explicitly DEGRADED, and malformed or empty successful payloads are rejected atomically. Every directory and click-count request rejects redirects, validates all resolved addresses as globally routable (including reserved/documentation IPv4 and special/non-global IPv6 exclusions), and pins the TLS connection to a validated address. Only MP3/AAC non-HLS directory rows with public HTTPS stream targets are returned; favicons are intentionally omitted. Pressing play connects one browser audio element directly to the selected broadcaster and calls the directory's click counter through known-ID-only POST /api/radio/click/:uuid. GEV never proxies, caches, records, bundles, or redistributes audio. Radio Browser supplies station-level tags, not dependable current-song or upcoming-program metadata, so Radio filtering never claims either. Direct playback exposes the listener's IP address to the broadcaster, whose own stream terms apply.
TomTom Traffic. Optional and BYOK: without TOMTOM_API_KEY the traffic layer runs its built-in simulation and no TomTom data (or attribution) appears. With a key, flow vector tiles are fetched through the server-side /api/tomtom proxy (120 s cache + a daily tile-budget governor — TOMTOM_DAILY_TILE_BUDGET, default 40,000, a configurable application safety ceiling, not a guarantee of staying within TomTom's monthly free allowance; TomTom's current pricing lists 200K free tile requests per month) and the "Traffic flow data © TomTom" credit is registered in the Data attribution popover the moment live mode activates. TomTom data is served live and cached only transiently (≤120 s TTL under .gev-cache/, gitignored) — it is not bundled or redistributed. One 23 KB point-in-time tile snapshot is committed as a decode-test fixture (src/data/fixtures/, © TomTom, never served to the app).
Re:Earth Terrain. Keyless (no API key). Used two ways: (1) src/mapStackController.js swaps in a Cesium.CesiumTerrainProvider pointed at Re:Earth's cesium-mesh/ellipsoid quantized-mesh endpoint for globe stacks without a Cesium ion token (e.g. OSM), replacing a flat EllipsoidTerrainProvider; falls back to the flat provider if the endpoint can't be reached. (2) The server-side /api/terrain/heights proxy (disk-cached, serve-stale) resolves per-point ellipsoidal ground height for entity placement. Both are best-effort with a keyless-safe fallback (bundled EGM96 geoid math) if Re:Earth is unreachable.
Global Context installation context. /api/military-installations queries only an allow-listed subset of OSM military=* and landuse=military features inside a maximum 10° non-dateline viewport. It caches and may serve stale mapped context, but it is neither a global installation database nor evidence of capability, activity, or absence. User-requested Google Places results remain separately sourced candidates unless their returned types explicitly establish military classification; generic offices, museums, and similarly ambiguous matches are excluded from military proximity counts.
Cockpit regional briefing. /api/regional-brief rounds aircraft coordinates into 0.1° cache cells, caches results for five minutes, and serializes Nominatim calls at no more than one request per second. Google News RSS is queried with the resolved locality/region first; GDELT is used only when that RSS query fails or is empty. Google's published Google News terms restrict that source to personal, noncommercial use, so commercial deployments must disable/replace it or obtain separate permission; GDELT permits commercial dataset use with citation. The Data attribution popover identifies the active headline sources; article links retain publisher attribution. Headlines are location-query matches, not verified incidents, risk rankings, or evidence that a location is safe. Empty, partial, stale, and unavailable source states remain distinct. Open-Meteo supplies current conditions independently of the news source. WX OFF disables cockpit weather rendering only; the Local Info briefing still fetches its source-backed weather values and displays the required linked Open-Meteo credit.
Dynamic weather presentation. While cockpit mode is active, /api/weather-effects requests current Open-Meteo observations for the aircraft/camera location, rounds coordinates into 0.1° cache cells, caches results for five minutes, and may retain a stale observation for up to 30 minutes during a transient outage. WMO condition code selects the visual family; observed cloud cover, precipitation, visibility, wind speed, and wind direction bound its strength and motion. Missing or expired weather renders no synthetic atmospheric effect, and normal globe view never renders the weather overlay.

Bundled snapshots (committed under `src/data/local_data/`)

Static datasets shipped in the repo for an out-of-the-box experience. None are MIT — each keeps its own license (see the carve-out in LICENSE). Each folder also has its own provenance README.

Dataset	Folder	License	Commercial use?	Attribution
Datacenters (~4.3K)	`datacenters/`	ODbL 1.0 (OpenStreetMap extract)	✅ (attribution + share-alike on data)	"© OpenStreetMap contributors"
Dams (704)	`dams/`	ODbL 1.0 (OpenInfraMap / OSM extract)	✅ (attribution + share-alike on data)	"© OpenStreetMap contributors" (+ Open Infrastructure Map)
TeleGeography Submarine Cable Map (712 cables + 1,917 landing points)	`telegeography_submarine_cables/`	CC BY-NC-SA 3.0	❌ NonCommercial — remove for commercial use	"© TeleGeography — submarinecablemap.com"
Natural Earth physical regions (1,046 land + 292 marine named polygons)	`natural_earth/`	Public domain	✅ (no restrictions)	"Made with Natural Earth" (courtesy credit — not legally required)
DataSF Analysis Neighborhoods (41 SF neighborhood polygons)	`neighborhoods/`	PDDL 1.0 (public domain)	✅ (no restrictions)	"City & County of San Francisco — DataSF" (courtesy — not legally required)

⚠️ TeleGeography is bundled but NonCommercial

The submarine-cable GeoJSON is CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 (Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike). It is bundled so the cables layer works out of the box, but it is not covered by this project's MIT license. CC BY-NC-SA permits redistribution with attribution and share-alike — which is exactly how it ships here — but the NonCommercial clause means:

If you use God's Eye View commercially, delete src/data/local_data/telegeography_submarine_cables/ (or obtain a commercial license from TeleGeography). It is one self-contained folder; the rest of the app runs without it.

The richer structured dataset is licensed separately/commercially by TeleGeography.

The OSM-derived datasets are under the Open Database License. ODbL's share-alike applies to the data / derived database, not this MIT-licensed code — the two coexist (exactly how Open Infrastructure Map ships: MIT software + ODbL data). If you publicly distribute a modified version of these databases, you must offer it under ODbL. Keep the "© OpenStreetMap contributors" notice (link: https://www.openstreetmap.org/copyright).

NASA FIRMS acknowledgement

We acknowledge the use of data and/or imagery from NASA's Fire Information for Resource Management System (FIRMS) (https://earthdata.nasa.gov/firms), part of NASA's Earth Observing System Data and Information System (EOSDIS).

FIRMS active fires are fetched live at runtime (CC0 / U.S. public domain data): the /api/firms server-side proxy merges the three VIIRS NRT sources (NOAA-20, NOAA-21, Suomi-NPP) clamped to the trailing 24 h, cached 30 min to respect the shared MAP_KEY transaction quota. Requires a free FIRMS_MAP_KEY (https://firms.modaps.eosdis.nasa.gov/api/map_key/); the layer is empty without it. The former bundled 2026-05-25 snapshot was removed 2026-07-16.

Natural Earth physical regions (`natural_earth/`)

Curated from the Natural Earth 10m physical vectors (https://www.naturalearthdata.com/ — fetched from the canonical nvkelso/natural-earth-vector GitHub repo, commit ca96624a56bd078437bca8184e78163e5039ad19, 2026-07-28): ne_10m_geography_regions_polys (mountain ranges, deserts, plateaus, peninsulas, islands, …) → regions.json and ne_10m_geography_marine_polys (seas, gulfs, straits, bays) → marine.json. They back the voice-annotation resolver's named-natural-region lookup (src/data/naturalEarthRegions.js), so "outline the Alps" draws the real range polygon offline.

Curation (provenance in each file's meta header): named features only, outer rings only, Douglas-Peucker simplified at ~0.01° with coordinates rounded to 3 decimals, sub-20 km² MultiPolygon crumbs and zero-area sliver artifacts dropped (7.3 MB source → 2.5 MB pack).

Natural Earth is public domain (no permission needed, no attribution legally required — https://www.naturalearthdata.com/about/terms-of-use/). We credit anyway: "Made with Natural Earth". Registration in the in-app dataCredits.js attribution list ships with the resolver wiring (see below).

DataSF Analysis Neighborhoods (`neighborhoods/`)

neighborhoods/san-francisco.json bundles the City & County of San Francisco's official "Analysis Neighborhoods" dataset (41 neighborhood polygons; DataSF dataset j2bu-swwd, catalog map view p5b7-5n3h). It backs the voice-annotation resolver's offline neighborhood-boundary lookup (src/data/neighborhoodPolygons.js), so "outline Chinatown" draws the city's real boundary polygon with no network dependency.

The dataset is licensed PDDL 1.0 (Open Data Commons Public Domain Dedication and License — public domain; the DataSF metadata declares licenseId: "PDDL"). No attribution is legally required; we note the source here and in the folder's SOURCE.md, which records the retrieval date (2026-07-30), exact download URL, license evidence, and the deterministic transform (scripts/build-sf-neighborhoods.mjs: nhood → name, ~2 m Douglas-Peucker simplification, 6-decimal rounding).

In-app attribution

The required Google Maps / Cesium credit renders on the on-globe credit line (#cesium-credits, bottom-left) and must stay visible — including in clean-view and recording modes (the whole line, logo + "Google Maps" + the "Data attribution" link, stays on screen; only the GEV panels/HUD fade). The layer-specific credits (adsb.lol, TeleGeography, OSM datacenters/dams/roads, NASA FIRMS, CelesTrak, USGS, City of Austin, GBFS, Radio Browser, OpenSky, AISStream) are registered into the expandable "Data attribution" popover on that credit line via viewer.creditDisplay.addStaticCredit(new Cesium.Credit(html, /* showOnScreen */ false)) — see src/data/dataCredits.js. When you add a new data source, add its license and attribution to this file and append an entry to DATA_CREDITS in src/data/dataCredits.js so it surfaces in the app.

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