Data and licenses
ZeroSignal is an app and website to discover, plan and share outdoor routes; Plan is its route planner. The maps, reference routes and places are built with open data from many sources. This page lists those sources, their licenses and the method we use to compute the derived layers.
Sources and licenses
Each source carries the attribution text its license asks for, exactly as the source publishes it and untranslated.
OpenStreetMap
Mapbox
Senderos FEDME (CNIG)
Caminos Naturales
EuroVelo (ECF)
ESA WorldCover 2021
SRTM / Skadi
Natura 2000 (EEA)
Espacios Naturales Protegidos (MITECO)
PEIN / ENPE (Generalitat de Catalunya)
IMD
EFFIS (Copernicus)
Overture Maps — Places
Wikidata
GraphHopper
Derived layers and method
Some layers used by the maps and by Plan are computed from OpenStreetMap, so they are derived databases under the Open Database License (ODbL). The ODbL asks us to offer the method used to make them, and this is it.
We start from the Geofabrik OpenStreetMap extracts for Spain, Andorra and four regions of southern France (Aquitaine, Midi-Pyrénées, Languedoc-Roussillon and Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur), merged into a single file. The current extract is from 4 October 2026. The layers are rebuilt once a month with the new extract.
- Landscape grid
- Splits the land into cells of about 250 m and stores seven values per cell. Naturalness: average of the ESA WorldCover classes in the cell and its surroundings (forest 100, wetland and snow 90, shrubland and grassland 80, water 70, bare ground 50, cropland 40, built-up 0). Relief: altitude range within 1 km, from 0 (flat) to 100 (600 m or more). Water: whether there is an OSM lake, river or coastline within 300 m. Viewpoints and peaks: how many OSM has within 1 km. Protected area: 1 inside Natura 2000 or PEIN, 2 for a natural or national park (MITECO's ENP or ENPE). Sealing: share of artificial surface according to WorldCover. Recent wildfire: whether the cell touches an EFFIS burnt perimeter from the last five years.
- Curvature per road section
- Our own reimplementation of the method Adam Franco describes for his curvature tool (we do not use his code). For every three consecutive points of an OSM road we compute the radius of the circle through them; points less than 10 m from the previous one are dropped and turns under 1.5° count as straight. Each section is worth its length times a weight based on the radius: 1 up to 175 m, 1.3 up to 100 m, 1.6 up to 60 m and 2 up to 30 m. The sum is divided by the road's length in kilometres.
- Curve clusters
- We take roads of at least 1 km in the top 10 % of curvature per kilometre, add a 500 m margin around them and merge the ones that touch. Clusters longer than 40 km are split into 15 km cells, and each one keeps a point on the road itself.
- Municipalities
- OSM administrative boundaries at level 8 (in Andorra, level 7: the parishes), simplified with a 50 m tolerance, to tell which municipality a point is in.
- Reference routes
- OSM hiking, cycling and mountain bike relations, plus roads with a proper name, merged with the FEDME trails, Caminos Naturales and EuroVelo. Two routes count as the same when their name or reference matches and they overlap by at least 70 % in both directions within a 30 m corridor; the OSM geometry is then kept with the name and reference of the official source. The geometry is simplified to 10 m, and Wikidata only adds how well known each route is.
- Places
- Our own census of restaurants, cafes, bars, bakeries, fuel stations, lodging and service areas from OSM and Overture. Two records are the same place when they are less than 60 m apart, share a word of the name and have the same category. Each place gets an «alive» score from 0 to 100: it goes up when the place appears in both sources, has a phone, website or opening hours and was edited in OSM in the last 24 months; it goes down when it is only in Overture with low confidence, and it is 0 when OSM marks it as closed.
- Routing graphs
- GraphHopper imports the same OSM extracts and computes routes with our own profiles per activity: motorbike (with curvy, scenic and toll-free variants), on foot (hiking and walking), bike (road, gravel and mountain bike) and tracks (trail motorbike and 4x4). The profiles only give more or less weight to each type of way; they do not add or remove OSM data.
License of the derived layers
- The layers derived from OpenStreetMap are offered under the ODbL 1.0, with the attribution «© OpenStreetMap contributors». If you want a copy of any of them, write to hola@zerosignal.app and we will send it in an open format.
- Whatever is derived from EuroVelo is also ODbL and is shared on the same terms.
- Whatever is derived from CC BY 4.0 sources (WorldCover, Natura 2000, ENP, FEDME and EFFIS) keeps its attribution and states the changes made.
- Overture data is redistributed with the text of the CDLA-Permissive 2.0 license; Foursquare data, with the Apache 2.0 license and its NOTICE.
- Community routes and spots are not derived from third parties: they are content of ZeroSignal and its users and are not part of these databases.
Trademarks
GR®, PR® and SL® are registered trademarks of the Spanish Mountain Sports and Climbing Federation (FEDME), and «Vía Verde» is a trademark of the Spanish Railways Foundation (FFE). Mapbox and GraphHopper are trademarks of their owners. ZeroSignal only uses them as a descriptive name for the source or the route.
Contact
Questions about a license, a missing attribution, or want a copy of a derived layer? Write to hola@zerosignal.app.
Updated on October 9, 2026