About LocateRight

What LocateRight is, where its data actually comes from, and how honest that list tries to be. Every claim below reflects the September 2026 backend audit of real code paths and live probes — not a wish-list of providers.

Data sources

1 · What powers Analyze

These are the only sources that feed the measurements you see when you analyze a location on the home page:

Overture Places — business and place records behind the business-density and places view.
OpenStreetMap (POI) — points of interest, contributing to the same place measurements.
Google Places live only — queried at request time when enabled; never stored, per Google's terms of service.
WorldPop — the population figures in the population block.
ESA WorldCover — the land-cover block.
Microsoft & Google Open Buildings coverage-dependent — building-footprint counts where footprints have actually been published for the area; some regions return no data.
Natural Earth — the country boundary drawn on the map.
GeoNames — the “nearest city” context line only.

Nightlights and weather datasets exist in the backend but the Analyze view on this site does not request them.

2 · Available as raw data in the catalog (via the API)

The catalog, reachable through the API documentation, lists additional datasets — for example GHSL, ERA5, VIIRS, DMSP, Landsat, Sentinel, NOAA, GTFS, OurAirports and Wikidata — with their records, extents and provenance. Honest note: these are catalog metadata. They do not drive the Analyze numbers above.

3 · Provenance is visible everywhere

Every measurement and record carries its source, version (the dataset snapshot it came from) and retrieved_at timestamp, so you can always tell which release you are looking at and when we fetched it. raw facts

Methodology

LocateRight shows raw observations and transparent derived measurements — counts, distances, densities, coverage — each one traceable back to its source and formula. The platform deliberately produces no scores, no rankings, no verdicts and no recommendations. We collect and validate raw geodata, minimally normalize it, store it with versions, and show it to you as it is. Judgements about a location are yours to make.

Supported infrastructure

A FastAPI service in front of a DuckDB catalog and an object store holding the raw files and their metadata.
Live Google Routes and Places calls when configured — requested at view time, results never persisted.
Open datasets ingested on their own release cadence; the version stamp on each record tells you exactly which snapshot you are reading.

Our raw-data philosophy

Location information is collected from a range of public and open geospatial sources, and data availability varies by location. An empty area on LocateRight is an honest empty area — we say so instead of smoothing it over. Licenses travel with the data: each source keeps its own terms, shown per record and attached to exports.