Terralocate

Terms of Use

Last updated: 25 May 2026

1. Acceptance of these terms

Terralocate (the “Service”) is an editorial atlas of places assembled from publicly available data and imagery. By accessing or using the Service you agree to these Terms of Use and to our Privacy Policy. If you do not agree, please do not use the Service.

2. Nature of the content

Terralocate compiles, restructures, and presents information derived from many independent public sources (listed in section 5). The Service is provided for general informational and educational purposes only. It is not a source of official statistics, legal advice, real-estate guidance, navigational data, emergency information, medical information, or any other professional advice. Numbers shown for population, demographics, weather, hazard risk, air quality, and similar metrics are derived from third-party datasets that may be incomplete, delayed, estimated, or inaccurate.

3. No warranty

THE SERVICE AND ALL CONTENT ARE PROVIDED “AS IS” AND “AS AVAILABLE” WITHOUT WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING WITHOUT LIMITATION ANY WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE, ACCURACY, COMPLETENESS, TIMELINESS, OR NON-INFRINGEMENT. We do not warrant that the Service will be uninterrupted, error-free, or secure.

4. Limitation of liability

To the maximum extent permitted by law, Terralocate, its operators, contributors, and licensors will not be liable for any indirect, incidental, special, consequential, exemplary, or punitive damages, or for any loss of profits, revenue, data, goodwill, or business opportunities, arising out of or in connection with your use of or inability to use the Service or any content on it.

5. Data sources and attribution

The Service is built on open data from many public and openly licensed sources. Each underlying dataset remains the property of its original publisher and is used under its own license. A complete, up-to-date inventory of providers and APIs is maintained on the Data Sources page. The categories below describe the licenses you will encounter when reusing material from the Service:

  • Public domain — Works of the U.S. federal government (Census, NOAA, USGS, EPA, FEMA, CDC, NCES) and many other national statistical offices. May be reused freely.
  • CC BY-SA 4.0 — Text excerpts derived from Wikipedia and many images on Wikimedia Commons. Downstream reuse must attribute Wikipedia/Commons and remain share-alike. Reuse of derived text on the Service inherits this license.
  • CC0 — Structured facts from Wikidata (population, area, elevation, inception, head of government, Commons image) and many GBIF records. No attribution required.
  • CC BY 4.0 — Open-Meteo weather and air-quality data, and many CC BY datasets on GBIF and Commons. Attribute the source on reuse.
  • ODbL — OpenStreetMap data (points of interest, walkability, boundaries). Substantial reuse requires attribution to “© OpenStreetMap contributors” and may trigger share-alike obligations.
  • National open-data terms — National statistical offices and government registries (e.g. ONS / NRS / NISRA Open Government Licence, ABS, StatCan, Destatis, INSEE, IBGE, Statistics Bureau of Japan, Argentina’s Georef, Türkiye’s public provinces API) — used under each provider’s own open-data terms. See the Data Sources page for the current list and links.
  • Per-contributor licenses — iNaturalist photos and some Wikimedia Commons and GBIF records carry the license chosen by the original contributor (CC BY-SA, CC BY, CC BY-NC, CC0, etc.). The original author and license are credited where the item is displayed.
  • Automated descriptive summaries — For places without a Wikipedia article, the short overview paragraph is composed automatically from the structured fields above (name, region, country, population, coordinates, elevation, area, time zone) by a deterministic template renderer. A small number of legacy pages still display an older AI-generated paragraph as a fallback; these are progressively being replaced. Summaries are not editorially reviewed and may contain inaccuracies.

If you believe a specific item is improperly attributed or has been included in error, please contact us and we will correct, re-attribute, or remove it promptly.

5a. AI-generated content

Portions of the content on Terralocate — particularly the short overview paragraph at the top of place pages that have no Wikipedia article — are produced or assembled automatically rather than written by a person. Two pipelines exist:

  1. Template-rendered summaries (current default) — A deterministic renderer composes a short paragraph at request time from the structured fields on the page (place name, region, country, population, coordinates, elevation, area, time zone, founding year). No language model is involved; the text is regenerated from the live database each time the page is viewed, so it automatically reflects the most recent figures.
  2. Legacy AI-generated summaries — A smaller number of pages still display a paragraph that was previously generated by a large language model (Google Gemini, via the Lovable AI Gateway) from the same structured fields. These are progressively being replaced by the template renderer above.

You should assume that any descriptive or narrative paragraph on the Service may have been produced or assembled by an automated system rather than written by a person. Labelling on individual pages may be subtle, incomplete, delayed, or missing. By using the Service you acknowledge and agree that:

  • Automatically produced text is generated without human review of each individual page and may contain factual errors, omissions, outdated information, or wording that does not reflect local usage.
  • Automated summaries are not a source of authoritative facts, official statistics, legal advice, travel advice, safety guidance, or any kind of professional advice.
  • Structured numeric fields shown alongside an automated summary (population, elevation, coordinates, demographic and weather data, etc.) come from the open data sources listed in section 5 and on the Data Sources page — not from the language model.
  • You are responsible for independently verifying anything material before relying on it. The disclaimers and limitation of liability in sections 3 and 4 apply in full to AI-generated content.
  • If you spot an inaccuracy in an automated summary, please contact us — we will correct or remove the affected page.

6. Your rights to use the content

You may view, share, and link to Terralocate pages for personal, educational, and journalistic use. When you reuse any underlying content, you must comply with the license of the original source. In particular:

  • Text and excerpts derived from Wikipedia remain under CC BY-SA 4.0; downstream reuse must attribute Wikipedia and remain share-alike.
  • Images credit and license the original creator as shown on Wikimedia Commons or iNaturalist.
  • OpenStreetMap-derived data remains under the ODbL; substantial reuse requires attribution to “© OpenStreetMap contributors” and may trigger share-alike obligations.
  • Bulk scraping, large-scale automated downloads, or republishing the Service’s database as a substitute service is not permitted.

The Terralocate name, logo, page layouts, editorial selection, and original commentary are © the operator of Terralocate and may not be reused without permission.

7. Acceptable use

You agree not to:

  • Use the Service in any way that violates applicable law or the rights of others.
  • Scrape, crawl, or harvest content at a rate or volume that disrupts the Service or its upstream data providers.
  • Attempt to reverse engineer, probe, or interfere with the Service’s security or infrastructure.
  • Use the Service to make decisions with material legal, financial, medical, safety, or emergency consequences.
  • Misrepresent data on Terralocate as official statistics or as endorsed by any government or third-party data provider.

8. Copyright and takedown

We respect copyright. If you are the rights holder of material that appears on Terralocate and you believe it has been used outside the terms of its license, please contact us with: (a) identification of the work, (b) the URL on Terralocate where it appears, (c) your contact information, and (d) a statement of the basis of your claim. We will review and act on valid notices promptly, typically by re-attributing or removing the material.

9. Third-party links

Pages on Terralocate frequently link to third-party sources (Wikipedia, government statistical offices, OpenStreetMap, and others). We do not control those sites and are not responsible for their content, accuracy, or practices.

10. Changes to the Service and these Terms

We may add, change, or remove features, datasets, and pages at any time without notice. We may also update these Terms; the “last updated” date at the top of the page will reflect the most recent revision. Continued use of the Service after a change constitutes acceptance of the updated Terms.

11. Governing law

These Terms are governed by the laws of the jurisdiction in which the operator of Terralocate resides, without regard to conflict-of-law rules. Any dispute arising from or related to the Service or these Terms shall be brought exclusively in the courts of that jurisdiction.

12. Contact

Questions about these Terms, attribution, or takedown requests can be sent through our contact form.