IntMap
The world today, or in any year, on one map.
IntMap is a free space-time atlas of the Earth: one map for the world as it is now and as it was on any date. Every border is drawn from a named record, and every layer names its source.
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What is IntMap?
IntMap is the map I wanted but could not find: one place where I could explore the world through whatever location, period, or type of data interested me.
It combines the functions of a world atlas, data explorer, historical map, news map, geographic toolkit, and experimental playground. Instead of moving between separate websites, you can place different kinds of information on the same map and examine how they relate.
IntMap is primarily designed for people interested in geography and international affairs, while aiming to make advanced geographic tools approachable through a visual interface and Atlas, its built-in AI interface.
What you can do
- Combine more than a hundred geographic and statistical layers
- Follow a country's goods trade partner by partner, by commodity and by year
- Read a country's electricity and primary-energy mix as a composition, not a single colour
- Watch the weather forecast itself: wind, temperature, precipitation, cloud, gusts, sea-level
pressure, dew point and CAPE, drawn from ECMWF's IFS HRES model at about 9 km, with a player that
runs from now to six days ahead — every weather layer has its own discrete time control in its own
legend, listing only the hours the model actually publishes. The wind is a WebGL particle field over
the model's own colour surface — both read the same numbers, and the value under the cursor comes
from that same field at that same forecast hour. Live precipitation radar loops over the last two hours.
- See the weather and disaster warnings an agency has actually issued, at the unit it issued them
for — 47 countries over thirteen feeds: Japan (JMA, down to the municipality), the United States
(NWS), Canada (ECCC), Germany (DWD), Norway (MET Norway), China (CMA), Australia (BoM), Brazil
(INMET), Hong Kong (HKO), the Philippines (PAGASA), Taiwan (CWA), New Zealand (MetService), and
thirty-five further European services through MeteoAlarm — plus every other national service that
files CAP into the WMO's own register, which the map reads at the polygon that service drew.
Each agency's own colours are the default and the hazard is named in YOUR language beside the
agency's own wording; a country whose service has not answered is drawn hatched, so "nothing
published" never looks like "nothing happening", and a tap answers for the point you pressed
- Read annual precipitation as a measured 1 km field, or as any single year from 1981 to 2020
- Compare any World Bank indicator in a year you choose, rather than whatever year each country last reported
- Look up high and low water anywhere on a coast, and how far the tide reaches over real terrain
- Explore climate, terrain, ecology, population, economics, infrastructure, and strategic geography
- Move the whole map through time with Chronos
- Compare countries through rankings, charts, tables, and correlation analysis
- View recent world news at the location where events occurred
- Monitor aircraft, earthquakes, weather, fires, volcanoes, and other changing information
- Measure distances and areas, draw regions, and inspect selected locations
- Use Atlas to control many parts of the application through natural language
- Switch between flat, globe, satellite, and 3D terrain views
- Explore experimental modes such as the Flight Simulator and World Explorer
Explore information on one map
The Information section is the largest part of IntMap.
Layers cover areas including:
- Physical geography and terrain
- Climate zones and weather
- Population and economic indicators
- Roads, railways, airports, ports, pipelines, and submarine cables
- Land cover, vegetation, ecosystems, and environmental conditions
- Earthquakes, volcanoes, tectonic plates, fires, and other natural hazards
- Political borders and administrative divisions
- Historical countries and borders
- International organizations and regional groupings
- Military expenditure, nuclear sites, front lines, and strategic infrastructure
- Live aircraft and optional live ship traffic — click an aircraft for a photograph of that airframe, its full ADS-B readout, and a one-click flight from its own position, altitude, heading and airspeed
- Ocean surface currents, named and drawn as arrows sized by measured speed, with warm and cold currents separated by their poleward flow rather than by assumption
- Satellite and Earth-observation data
- Bilateral goods trade, electricity and primary-energy mix, crop yields, tides, and live weather and disaster warnings
Layers can be combined rather than viewed in isolation. For example, you can place population density over terrain, compare railway networks with economic indicators, or examine a current event alongside the geography and infrastructure surrounding it.
Some live and satellite services require a separate provider key, which is stored only in the browser.
Chronos
Chronos is IntMap’s master clock. It reaches the earliest bundled historical snapshot, with coverage varying by source, and it moves
the whole map together rather than one layer at a time.
Depending on the selected year and available data, it can update:
- Countries and political borders
- Historical states
- Population and GDP data
- Country rankings and comparisons
- NATO and European Union membership
- Climate-period layers
- Bilateral trade (1995-2024), energy mix, and crop yields
Historical coverage is not equally detailed for every year or region. Borders and historical data may be simplified, approximate, or based on the closest available dataset.
Atlas
Atlas is the interface connecting IntMap’s map, data, tools, and analysis.
Instead of locating every control manually, you can describe what you want to explore.
Examples:
Show railways and population density in Japan.
Take me to the Strait of Hormuz.
Show Europe in 1945.
Compare Germany, France, and Italy.
Turn on earthquakes and volcanoes.
Find nuclear sites near major rivers.
How far can I walk in one hour from my location?
Cities over 1 million with under 500 mm of rain a year, more than 200 km from the sea,
that had an M5+ earthquake in the last 30 days.
Change the map to a globe and show country borders.
The rain-and-earthquakes example is a query, not an essay. IntMap filters its own datasets and
intersects them — GeoNames population, CHELSA annual precipitation, the distance from each place to
the Natural Earth coastline, and the USGS earthquake catalogue — and answers with the matching rows,
pinned on the map, with the source of every column printed underneath. Conditions it could not
evaluate, and anything it had to cut short, are stated rather than left out. Any combination works:
country statistics and World Bank indicators, elevation, current temperature, volcanoes, and
OpenStreetMap facilities can all appear in the same question.
The walking example is a reachable area, not a circle: it is traced over the real road network
(Valhalla / OpenStreetMap), so rivers, motorways and dead ends shape it. Asking in terms of
travel time — walking, cycling, driving, or the reachable stations by rail — gives that,
never a straight-line radius standing in for it.
Atlas can navigate the map, control layers, select and compare countries, activate tools, change historical periods, and perform a growing range of geographic actions.
It does not yet operate every feature reliably. Complex multi-step requests, current-information research, and newly added tools may fail or produce incomplete results.
Built-in AI is currently free for logged-in users, with a limit of up to 10 uses per day. Most non-AI map features can be used without an account.
Atlas may make factual or operational mistakes. Important information should always be checked against its original source.
Countries
The Countries section provides a structured way to explore and compare national data.
Available tools include:
- Country profiles
- Global rankings
- Numeric filters
- Historical time-series charts
- Multi-country comparison
- Bar charts and data tables
- CSV export
- Pearson and Spearman correlation
- Regression and residual maps
Current data is generally more complete than historical data. Availability varies between countries, years, and indicators.
Recent world news
IntMap places recent headlines on the map at one location only: where the reported event happened.
Which organizations are covering an event, and when, is answered by the Coverage list inside the
event itself rather than by a second set of pins on the map.
The News section also supports searching, saved articles, multiple news languages, and optional AI-assisted title translation.
News collection and geographic classification are still being improved. Locations, translations, dates, and summaries may occasionally be incomplete or incorrect.
IntMap is not intended to replace a dedicated news service.
Experimental exploration
IntMap also includes less serious, experimental ways to explore the world.
Flight Simulator
Fly an aircraft directly over the same globe, terrain, and geographic environment used by IntMap.
You can also start a flight from a real airplane: click any aircraft in the live traffic layer and take off from exactly where it is, at its reported altitude, on its heading, at its airspeed.
The simulator is under active development and is not intended to match a dedicated professional flight simulator. Desktop use is recommended.
World Explorer
A satellite-based geography challenge that places you somewhere on land and asks you to identify the location.
Quiz
Test geographic knowledge directly through the map.
Other experimental features may appear, change substantially, or be removed as development continues.
Beyond the map
Keep zooming out and the map does not stop at the edge of the world. There is no button: the same
gesture carries the Earth you were looking at into the solar system, at the same size, showing the
same face, at the same instant — and back again the same way.
- The Sun, the eight planets, Pluto and the Moon, positioned from published orbital elements rather than drawn to look right
- 177 satellites of the other planets, each propagated in the reference plane its own published elements declare
- Stars placed at their measured distances from Hipparcos parallaxes, so pulling far enough away actually changes the constellations. Where a parallax is not usable — about four percent are negative, which is measurement noise, not a nearby star — the star is placed at the furthest distance that was measured and reported as a lower bound rather than invented
- The sky from a point on the ground: right-click anywhere for the view from there at any date and time, with the real horizon computed from terrain, so mountains hide the stars they actually hide
Interface
IntMap supports:
- Flat and globe projections
- Satellite imagery
- 3D terrain
- Light and dark themes
- Custom accent colors
- Solid and translucent sidebars
- Metric and imperial units
- Celsius and Fahrenheit
- Localized or English place labels
- Favorite layers
- Layer search and visual previews
- Screenshots and shareable map views - the link carries the layers, the camera (including its
angle and 3-D terrain), the point in time, and the numbers typed into a simulation, so a shared
view reopens on the same answer. A reload restores the same session, and falls back to the map
alone if the previous attempt did not survive
- An explanation of the method behind every simulation - Settings > Science & logic
- A Panels mode - Settings > Legends and tool windows. Every legend, readout and tool window
moves out of the map and into one tab in the left sidebar, leaving the map clear. Popups anchored
to a place you clicked stay where they are, because they belong to that point on the map
- Desktop keyboard shortcuts
Desktop users can also enable Window Workspace, which turns the map, Information, News, Countries, Layers, and Atlas into movable and resizable windows. Workspace layouts are saved locally.
The mobile interface supports most standard map features, although complex tools and experimental modes may work better on a larger screen.
Languages
The interface is available in nine languages:
- English
- 日本語
- Deutsch
- Русский
- Español
- 繁體中文
- 简体中文
- Français
- 한국어
All nine are complete on every surface the project measures — the keyed interface, the in-line
text and the two reading pages. Coverage is re-measured on every build, and a language is labelled
"beta" automatically if it ever falls below 98%; none currently is. Place-name labels support the
same languages. A small residue of reference tables is not yet routed through the translation
system and reads English in every language; that residue is counted and tracked rather than hidden.
Anything untranslated falls back to English per string, never per screen.
Atlas normally responds in the language used in the request.
Free and ad-free
IntMap is currently free to use and does not display advertising.
Most map and data features are available without registration. An account is mainly required for built-in AI access and certain account-linked settings.
The project is being developed with the intention of remaining free of advertising.
Current status
IntMap is under active development.
Some datasets, news features, Atlas actions, routes, live integrations, mobile interfaces, and experimental modes remain incomplete or unstable. External services may also become unavailable, impose limits, or change without notice.
The project is best treated as an evolving exploration platform rather than a finished professional product.
Bug reports and feature suggestions are welcome through GitHub Issues. Pull requests are not currently being accepted.
Terms, privacy, and how it works
For the repository itself, docs/README.md is the index of the documentation: which file owns which fact, who it is for, and when it has to be updated.
About the project
IntMap is independently developed and maintained by one university student.
It began without a conventional software-development background and has grown through continuous experimentation and AI-assisted development.
The project exists for two straightforward reasons:
- I wanted this kind of tool for myself.
- I want to turn it into a sustainable independent product.
Support IntMap
IntMap has ongoing hosting, data-service, and AI API costs.
Voluntary support helps keep the project online and allows its development to continue.
Support independent development through Stripe →
Support is voluntary and does not currently unlock additional features.
Data and attribution
IntMap combines data from many public institutions, open-data projects, news publishers, map providers, and external APIs.
Sources include organizations and projects such as:
- NASA
- World Bank
- WorldPop
- USGS
- Natural Earth
- OpenStreetMap contributors
- Open-Meteo
- GDELT
- Google News
- adsb.lol (community ADS-B, ODbL 1.0 — read once by IntMap's server and served to every reader) and Planespotters.net (aircraft photography)
- Other weather, satellite, geographic, and statistical providers
The complete current list is available under Settings → Data & attribution.
Each external dataset and service remains subject to its provider’s own license, attribution requirements, access restrictions, and terms of use. Inclusion does not imply endorsement of or affiliation with IntMap.
License
IntMap is not an open-source project.
The source code is publicly visible under the custom IntMap Personal & Research Use License.
The license permits use, copying, and modification for:
- Personal, non-revenue-generating use
- Teaching and study
- Non-commercial educational use
- Non-commercial research at an academic or nonprofit institution
Redistributed copies must retain the license and attribution, and modifications must be clearly identified.
Commercial use requires a separate prior written license from the copyright holder.
Third-party data, imagery, APIs, and other external materials are governed by their own terms.
Disclaimer
IntMap is intended for exploration, general information, and education.
It should not be relied upon for emergency response, professional navigation, academic conclusions, medical or legal decisions, financial decisions, military operations, or other safety-critical activity.
Information may be delayed, incomplete, simplified, inaccurate, or unavailable. AI-generated output may contain errors.
Historical borders and territorial classifications are technical representations derived from external datasets. They do not express support for any political position or sovereignty claim.
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