Pelias: The World Is Yours

Pelias is a search engine for places worldwide, powered by open data. It turns addresses and place names into geographic coordinates, and turns geographic coordinates into places and addresses. With Pelias, you’re able to turn your users’ place searches into actionable geodata and transform your geodata into real places.

Not only is Pelias completely powered by open data, but it is available to everyone, and importantly open to all to make better. We’re building it in the open using Node.js and Elasticsearch. It is open to collaboration from all to make searching our world better and smarter.

We think open data, open source, and open strategy win over proprietary solutions at any part of the stack and we want to ensure the services we offer are in line with that vision. We believe that an open geocoder improves over the long-term only if the community can incorporate truly representative local knowledge.

You can run it yourself, or you can contact Geocode Earth to access their hosted version!

Let us know if you want to help!

Features

Autocomplete

Watch places fall into place with autocomplete. Pelias is built from the bottom up to support autocomplete, so when your users search for somewhere, they’ll have found it before they’re finished typing.

Search globally, find locally

Break out of the bounding box to provide a local search that combines the best nearby search results with the best matches from around the world.

Focused search brings together local knowledge and worldly experience, so your users’ searches will bring back the best matches, whether those results around the corner or around the world. By prioritizing local results, your users can see nearby places they know when they search for addresses, businesses, and neighborhoods while still searching globally.

You can feed Pelias the whole world, or just a local dataset that works best for your needs.

Open Data + Open Source: Better Together

Pelias brings together the best open data sets in the world with the best of open source. Pelias is designed to leverage the local knowledge of open contributors from across the world. When you search with Pelias, you’re searching the expertise of a global network of contributors to OpenStreetMap, Pelias, and OpenAddresses. And if you don’t need everything, you can choose the dataset that works best for your needs.

Get Started

Let’s Do This

You can run Pelias yourself, or you can get an account with Geocode Earth to start searching the world today.

If you’re looking to use Pelias with a Leaflet map, check out the geocoder options in the Mapzen JavaScript SDK.

Contribute

Pelias is an open-source geocoder using and open data. We want Pelias to see the world through everyone’s eyes and we welcome contributions from all! If you’re interested in contributing, you can read more about our philosophy of how open source and open data can come together to change the world.

Talk to Us

Questions? Comments? Drop us a line: open a GitHub issue.