Credits & attributions

Standing on the shoulders of an open community

Geo-Intellisense exists because of decades of open science, open data, and open-source software. We owe an enormous debt to the researchers, agencies, and engineers who made this knowledge free — and we want to name them.

Every map our agents produce rests on work done by others: Earth-observation missions flown by space agencies, global datasets maintained by scientists, cartographic methods refined over a century, and open-source libraries written by thousands of contributors. This page credits them. Where a source asks for a specific attribution, we reproduce it verbatim and honor its license. If we have mis-stated or omitted an attribution, please tell us and we will correct it.

Open data & Earth observation

  • Copernicus / Sentinel — European Space Agency (ESA) & the European Union. We attribute Sentinel data as “Copernicus Sentinel data [year]”, and where data are adapted, “Contains modified Copernicus Sentinel data [year]”, per the Copernicus Sentinel Data Legal Notice.
  • Landsat & MODIS — NASA and the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS). Landsat, MODIS, NLCD, and related Earth-observation products are works of the U.S. Government and are in the public domain; we credit NASA / USGS as a courtesy.
  • SRTM elevation — the Shuttle Radar Topography Mission, NASA / USGS, public domain.
  • OpenStreetMap — © OpenStreetMap contributors, available under the Open Database License (ODbL). Map data derived from OSM carries this attribution and a link to the license.
  • Natural Earth — public-domain vector and raster basemap data curated by Tom Patterson, Nathaniel Vaughn Kelso, and contributors (terms of use). No attribution is required; we credit it gladly.
  • HydroSHEDS — global hydrography from WWF / USGS. We cite Lehner, B., Verdin, K., Jarvis, A. (2008), New global hydrography derived from spaceborne elevation data, Eos 89(10): 93–94, per the HydroSHEDS license.
  • NOAA — CoastWatch, GHRSST sea-surface temperature, and hazard products from the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, public domain.
  • European Environment Agency & Copernicus Land Monitoring Service — CORINE Land Cover, WorldCover, and related land products.
  • Cloud-hosted open catalogs — Microsoft Planetary Computer, AWS Open Data, and Google Earth Engine. These platforms host hundreds of datasets, each under its own license; we honor each dataset's individual terms and the host platform's terms of service.

Basemaps & map tiles

The basemaps available in the workspace are served by the providers below. Each is shown with the attribution we display in-product — and the active basemap's attribution always appears live in the map's status bar.

  • CARTO — Dark Matter, Positron, and Voyager styles. “© OpenStreetMap contributors, © CARTO”.
  • OpenFreeMap — Liberty, Bright, Positron, and Fiord vector styles, built on OpenStreetMap data and the OpenMapTiles schema. “© OpenStreetMap contributors”.
  • Esri / ArcGIS Online — World Imagery, World Topographic, Light & Dark Gray Canvas, National Geographic, Ocean, and World Street Map. Attributions include “Esri, Maxar, Earthstar Geographics”; “Esri, HERE, Garmin, FAO, NOAA, USGS”; “Esri, National Geographic”; and “Esri, Garmin, GEBCO, NOAA NGDC”.
  • EOX — “Sentinel-2 cloudless 2020 © EOX IT Services”.
  • OpenTopoMap — “© OpenStreetMap contributors, SRTM | © OpenTopoMap (CC-BY-SA)”.
  • CyclOSM — “© CyclOSM, © OpenStreetMap contributors”.
  • OpenStreetMap standard tiles — “© OpenStreetMap contributors”.
  • EMODnet Bathymetry — “EMODnet Bathymetry Consortium, GEBCO”.
  • OpenSeaMap — “© OpenSeaMap contributors”.
  • GEBCO — the General Bathymetric Chart of the Oceans, used in the ocean and bathymetry basemaps.

Cartographic science

  • ColorBrewer — color schemes by Cynthia A. Brewer, Mark Harrower, and The Pennsylvania State University, under an Apache-style 2.0 license. As requested: “Colors from colorbrewer2.org, by Cynthia A. Brewer, Geography, Pennsylvania State University.”
  • Jacques Bertin — Sémiologie Graphique (1967), the foundation of the visual-variable model our style engine uses.
  • Eduard Imhof & Tom Patterson — shaded-relief and terrain-cartography conventions.
  • Joshua Stevens — bivariate choropleth methods.
  • International Commission on Stratigraphy (ICS) & USGS / FGDC — the official geologic time-scale interval colors.
  • IPCC, NASA GISS, and NOAA — established conventions for climate-anomaly and remote-sensing visualization.

Open-source software

Geospatial core

  • GDAL/OGR (MIT) — raster & vector format translation, an OSGeo project.
  • GEOS (LGPL) — geometry operations.
  • PROJ (MIT/X) — coordinate transformations and projections.
  • H3 (Apache 2.0) — Uber's hexagonal hierarchical spatial index.

Data engine & formats

  • DuckDB & the DuckDB Spatial extension (MIT) — the in-process analytical SQL engine.
  • Apache Arrow (Apache 2.0) and GeoArrow — columnar in-memory geospatial data.
  • GeoTIFF.js (MIT) — raster decoding in the browser.

Mapping & visualization

  • MapLibre GL JS (BSD-3-Clause) — the open vector map renderer.
  • deck.gl & luma.gl (MIT) — WebGL/WebGPU data visualization, from the vis.gl / OpenJS Foundation community.
  • three.js (MIT) — 3D graphics powering the globe and scenes.

Workspace & runtimes

  • React (MIT), Astro (MIT), and Vite (MIT) — application and site framework.
  • Monaco Editor (MIT) — the code editor.
  • xterm.js (MIT) — the integrated terminal.
  • Python (PSF) and R (GPL) — the server-side scientific runtimes and their geospatial ecosystems.

Standards

  • Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) — WMS, WFS, WMTS, and OGC API standards for interoperable spatial services.
  • STAC — the SpatioTemporal Asset Catalog specification for discovering imagery and other assets.
  • Model Context Protocol (MCP) — the open standard for connecting AI to tools and data, now stewarded by the Linux Foundation.

A note on attribution

When our agents pull a dataset into your workspace, its source and license travel with it — and they are carried through to the maps, reports, and exports you produce, so the original authors are credited downstream. Open data and open science are a shared trust; we intend to be good stewards of it. Questions, corrections, or a source we should add? Get in touch.