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PlaceRoot grounds AI agents in open map data. It's an MCP server that answers spatial questions — what's nearby, what's in this neighborhood, how do I get there — from Overture Maps open data. No API key, no signup, no vendor platform.
An independent project by vibemapper.
- 🎯
Answers, not data dumps. Every tool returns compact, ranked results sized for an agent's context window — never a raw GeoJSON dump. - 🗺️
Real routing, zero keys.
route
andisochrone
walk an actual street graph built from Overture's transportation segments — not a straight-line guess — anywhere on Earth. - 🚶
Reachability-filtered search.find_places(..., within={"minutes": 15, "mode": "walk"})
keeps only results truly inside the street-graph walk/cycle/driveshed — not a radius that guesses at it, and not a second call to intersect a polygon yourself. - 🏙️ Rich, filterable place data. Category, brand, confidence, operating status, contactability — sourced from Overture's open dataset (contributed by Meta, Uber, TomTom, and others). - 📐 Boundary-accurate. Search inside a named place's real administrative polygon, not a guessed radius circle. - ⚡ Zero setup. Reads Overture's public data directly — no key, no database, nothing to install beyond the server itself.
Run it straight from PyPI or npm — no install step:
uvx placeroot # stdio MCP server
uvx placeroot --http # HTTP endpoint at http://127.0.0.1:8321/mcp
Add to Claude Code
claude mcp add placeroot -- uvx placeroot
Add to Claude Desktop
Add to your claude_desktop_config.json
:
{
"mcpServers": {
"placeroot": {
"command": "uvx",
"args": ["placeroot"]
}
}
}
Add to Cursor / other MCP clients
Same config as above wherever your client keeps its MCP server list. Prefer npm? Use "command": "npx", "args": ["placeroot"]
.
{
"mcpServers": {
"placeroot": {
"command": "npx",
"args": ["placeroot"]
}
}
}
Then ask your agent something spatial:
"What's around downtown Palo Alto?" · "Compare these two neighborhoods for a bike shop." · "Plan my errands: pharmacy, hardware store, post office."
42 tools, grouped into four families — every answer fits in a couple of thousand tokens:
| Family | Tools | Answers questions like |
|---|---|---|
| 🔍 Search & identify | ||
find_places , find_near , geocode , reverse_geocode , place_details , search_categories , warmup_city , … |
||
| What cafés are near this point? Coffee near the Eiffel Tower? | ||
| 📊 Area analysis | ||
summarize_area , compare_areas , neighborhood_verdict , summarize_buildings , land_use_at , … |
||
| What's in this neighborhood, should I live here, and how does it differ from that one? | ||
| 🚴 Routing | ||
route , from_to , isochrone , optimize_route , places_along_route , distance_matrix , travel_time_matrix |
||
| How far to walk from A to B? What's reachable in 15 minutes? Best order for 6 stops? | ||
| 🗺️ Geometry & maps | ||
render_map , simplify_geometry |
||
| Show me this result as an interactive map |
It also ships seven workflow prompts (site selection, neighborhood comparison, errand planning, should I live here, get to know my city, verify listing claims, plan area visit) and three attachable resources — and a PLACEROOT_TOOLS
setting to load only the tool profiles you need, cutting schema overhead by up to 95%.
📚 Full tool catalog, prompts, resources & configuration → docs/REFERENCE.md
Note
Open data has honest limits: no live traffic, no opening hours, no ratings or photos — what PlaceRoot deliberately doesn't do. For everything else about where things are and what's reachable from them, it answers without a key.
It's the only keyless MCP server doing real graph routing over global open map data — with every tool declaring proper MCP annotations so clients know which calls are read-only before prompting you. Stable GERS ids let agents hold onto places across turns; local caching makes repeat queries answer in milliseconds and keeps working offline; and the whole thing is self-hostable end to end.
How it stacks up against Mapbox MCP and Google Maps MCP: head-to-head benchmarks · token-efficiency numbers.
Overture's places theme is derived from business listings, which makes it strong on businesses and thin on the places a family goes on a Saturday — playgrounds, neighbourhood parks, dog parks, beaches. Those features aren't missing from Overture, though; they're in a different theme. Overture's base
theme is a direct conflation of OpenStreetMap, and PlaceRoot already queries it for land_use_at
and infrastructure_at
. The places tools read it too, by default.
Nothing is downloaded, built, or hosted — it's one more live scan of the same public Overture release, and it roughly 2.5x es playground coverage (1,552 vs 674 across New York City in release 2026-07-22.0
, with 1,013 of them more than 150 m from any places-theme playground). Every places tool answers from both at once, with no other change: same tools, same response shape, same category filters.
The cost is a second dataset scan per places query (cached like everything else), and these rows carry no confidence
or operating_status
and are often unnamed — an unnamed playground comes back with name: null
rather than being dropped. If you'd rather have the latency than the coverage:
export PLACEROOT_RECREATION_LAYER=0
data_version
reports the layer whenever it's active. Full details, including why live Overpass queries and raw OSM Parquet were measured and rejected: docs/RECREATION.md.
uv sync # install dev dependencies
uv run pytest # offline test suite
uv run ruff check .
See CONTRIBUTING.md for dev setup, design rules, and how to propose a tool. Other docs: CHANGELOG · SECURITY · publishing · website · running a data mirror · the recreation layer
hello@placeroot.dev
Developed by vibemapper.
PlaceRoot runs on your machine — no account, no API key, no sign-up. It has no telemetry and sends nothing to us; the only network traffic is your own queries going straight to Overture Maps' public data on AWS S3 (or a mirror you configure). Full details: placeroot.dev/privacy.html.
The code is MIT. The data it queries is the Overture Maps public release, licensed per theme — places under CDLA-Permissive-2.0; the OSM-derived themes (divisions, transportation, base) under ODbL, which asks for attribution on anything user-facing you build from them:
© Overture Maps Foundation · © OpenStreetMap contributors (
[ODbL])
Per-theme obligations: docs/DATA-LICENSE.md.
mcp-name: io.github.chuofringer/placeroot