aureality.cloud
Legal
Licences and credits
The .are format is open so that anyone can read, write and build on it. The privacy notice for the Aureality app lives on aureality.eu/privacy.
.are format licences
| Part | Licence |
|---|---|
| Specification text | Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (CC BY 4.0) |
| JSON schema and vocabulary | Public domain |
| Reference code and examples | Apache License 2.0 |
Credits for this site
| Item | Source and licence |
|---|---|
| Earth daytime imagery | NASA Visible Earth, Blue Marble. Public domain. |
| Earth at night | NASA Earth Observatory, Black Marble. Public domain. |
| Country borders, capitals, population and GDP estimates | Natural Earth. Public domain. |
| Earthquakes | U.S. Geological Survey live feed. Public domain. |
| Air traffic, live | adsb.lol, positions received by volunteer ADS-B stations, Open Database License (ODbL 1.0). Fetched through a small aureality.cloud proxy that keeps each area for 20 seconds. Not for navigation. |
| Most interesting now: aircraft | adsb.lol (ODbL 1.0), queried by squawk, aircraft type and registration through our proxy and cached for 90 seconds. We pick up to 30 aircraft worldwide (emergencies first, then rare types). Origin and destination are not part of this data, so they are not shown. |
| Satellites, live | Orbits from CelesTrak GP data (public), refreshed at most every 2 hours as CelesTrak asks. Positions computed in your browser with satellite.js (MIT License). |
| Rocket launches | Launch Library 2 by The Space Devs (thespacedevs.com), free tier, cached on our proxy for 15 minutes. |
| Weather balloons | SondeHub (sondehub.org), radiosonde tracking by volunteers, CC BY-SA. |
| 3D models: ISS and Hubble | NASA 3D Resources (nasa3d.arc.nasa.gov), courtesy of NASA. Reduced in size for the web. NASA does not endorse Aureality. |
| 3D models: aircraft, rockets, Tiangong, crew and cargo ships | Scale models made by Aureality from each type's published dimensions. Simplified, not exact replicas; no third-party models are used. |
| Governments, elections, founding dates | Wikidata. Public domain (CC0). |
| Economic figures (growth, inflation, unemployment, trade, city population) | World Bank Open Data. CC BY 4.0. |
| News by place | The GDELT Project, fetched through a small aureality.cloud proxy that keeps each feed for 30 minutes. Headlines link to the original outlets. |
| Places on the 3D map | Click any building, street or town: the details come from OpenStreetMap (© OpenStreetMap contributors, ODbL), looked up with Nominatim, plus Wikidata (CC0) and Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0). Lookups happen only when you click, at most one a second. |
| World events | Wikipedia “Current events” portal, CC BY-SA 4.0. Placed using the coordinates of the linked Wikipedia articles. Links go to the news source Wikipedia cites. |
| EU press releases | European Commission press corner, © European Union, reused under CC BY 4.0 (Commission Decision 2011/833/EU). Titles and links only; the release is not changed. |
| Crises and disasters | ReliefWeb, a service of the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA). Titles and links only; each report belongs to the organisation that published it. |
| Social posts | Public posts from the “Verified News” feed on Bluesky and from #news, #worldnews and #breakingnews on mastodon.social. Shown as short text with the author and a link to the original; posts marked sensitive or labelled by moderators are left out. Each post belongs to its author. |
| Picked posts from X | Posts chosen by Aureality and shown through X’s own embed. We store only the link. Nothing is loaded from X, and X sets no cookies, until you press “Show post from X”; after that X’s own privacy policy applies. |
| On this day in history | Wikipedia. CC BY-SA 4.0. |
| Sentinel-2 imagery (globe option and close-up map) | EOxCloudless 2016 by EOX IT Services GmbH (cloudless.eox.at), CC BY 4.0. Contains modified Copernicus Sentinel data 2016 & 2017. |
| Terrain in the close-up map | Mapterhorn terrain tiles, built from open elevation data including Copernicus DEM © DLR e.V. 2010-2014 and © Airbus Defence and Space GmbH 2014-2018, provided under COPERNICUS by the European Union and ESA. |
| Buildings, roads and place names in the close-up map | © OpenStreetMap contributors, available under the Open Database License (ODbL). Vector tiles © OpenMapTiles, served by OpenFreeMap. Map rendering: MapLibre GL JS (BSD-3-Clause). |
| Webcams | Only cameras their owners offer to the public. Pictures always load straight from the owner and are never stored by Aureality. Finland: Fintraffic / digitraffic.fi, CC BY 4.0. London: Powered by TfL Open Data. California: Caltrans (CWWP2). U.S. national parks: National Park Service, with each image credit. Webcams provided by Windy.com (shown with a link back to each camera). Other camera positions: © OpenStreetMap contributors (ODbL); those cameras are only linked, their pictures belong to their operators. Lists are fetched through a small aureality.cloud proxy that keeps each list for hours. |
| Monuments in 3D | Open-licence scans on Sketchfab (CC0 or CC BY 4.0). Each model's author, licence and source link are shown with the model. Aureality shows them with Sketchfab's viewer and does not host the files. |
| Place summaries in the details pane | Lead paragraphs from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0, with a link to each article. |
| Alliance member lists | Public member lists of the EU, NATO, ASEAN and the African Union. |
| Ocean mask and stars | Made for this site from the imagery above. |
| 3D rendering | three.js, MIT licence. |
| Fonts | Outfit and IBM Plex Mono, SIL Open Font License, via Google Fonts. |
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