Terms of service

These terms govern your use of Coordinately at coordinately.org — the editorial content, the interactive tools, the reference datasets, and any other material published on the site. By using the site you accept these terms.

Content licence

Coordinately editorial content (articles, guides, reference pages, trust pages) is published under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International licence (CC BY 4.0). You can copy, redistribute, remix, transform, and build on the material — including for commercial use — as long as you give appropriate credit, link to the licence, and indicate if changes were made. A link to the source page on coordinately.org is the simplest way to satisfy the attribution requirement.

Reference datasets published under /reference/ are also CC BY 4.0; the underlying primary data they aggregate (IANA tz database, NGS coordinates, etc.) is governed by its own upstream licence and credit is given to the upstream authority on each reference page.

No warranty

Coordinately is provided “as is” for informational purposes. Every tool publishes the formula it uses and the expected accuracy bound for its output (see /accuracy). Every article cites the primary source for every numerical claim. Even so, errors are possible: a cited source may revise its figures, a typed input may exceed a formula's valid range, a tool may have a bug we have not yet caught.

You should not rely on Coordinately as the sole authority for decisions where accuracy is consequential — surveying, aviation, marine navigation, legal property boundaries, search-and-rescue. For those uses, treat Coordinately as an aid for understanding and cross-checking, and verify against an authoritative primary source before acting.

To the maximum extent permitted by law, Coordinately disclaims all warranties, express or implied, including warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, and non-infringement.

Acceptable use

Coordinately is provided for human reading and reasonable tool use. Behaviour that strains the site or its upstream providers is not acceptable use:

• High-volume scraping of the site to mirror content. CC BY 4.0 permits republishing with attribution; doing so by hammering the site at request rates that interfere with other readers is not covered by the licence and is not permitted under these terms.
• Repeatedly hitting the geocoding or elevation endpoints in a way that exhausts an upstream provider's quota. The free tiers of Mapbox and OpenTopoData are shared resources; usage that consumes those resources for purposes other than the site's intended interactive use may be rate-limited or blocked.
• Using the site, its tools, or its content for activities that violate applicable laws or the rights of others.

Third-party services

Some tools call third-party services in order to function. The relevant external services and their roles are documented in the privacy policy at /privacy-policy. Each third-party service operates under its own terms of service, which take precedence over these terms for that service's own conduct. Notably:

• Map tiles are served by MapTiler.
• Address geocoding uses Mapbox.
• Elevation uses USGS 3DEP and OpenTopoData / SRTM30m.

Changes to these terms

We may revise these terms. When we do, the change is reflected in the dateModified field on this page and a corresponding entry is added to /changelog. Continued use of the site after a change indicates acceptance of the revised terms. We do not retroactively change past terms — your visit was governed by the terms active at the time.

Contact

Questions about these terms go to info@coordinately.org.