Partners
Supporters
herimap is small, and almost nothing in it was built alone. This page names what holds it up — and how to add your own weight to it.
The open records it starts from
Every building on the map begins as an entry in a public database. OpenStreetMap contributors mapped most of them, under the Open Database Licence; Wikidata released its share into the public domain; photographers on Wikimedia Commons supplied pictures of buildings that had never been photographed for any catalogue.
None of them were asked, and none of them are paid. The licences, and how to cite a record, are set out in full on the data page.
About the dataThe associations
National associations of house owners exist in most European countries and hold a trust we have not yet earned. Where one has opened a door, a country's houses become reachable in weeks rather than years.
Browse associationsThe owners
The first owners to claim a house did it before there was anything to see, on the word of somebody they had only just met. Every entry now worth reading exists because one of them spent an afternoon on it.
Where it runs
On European infrastructure, deliberately: the live database and the uploaded photographs in Germany, the backups in France and Finland. The research corpus is archived and given a permanent identifier by Zenodo, which is run by CERN — so it outlasts us.
How to support the work
Three things help more than anything else, and not one of them is money.
Introduce us to an owner
One warm introduction is worth a hundred cold letters, and it is what most of this map was built from.
Open a country
If you sit on the board of a national association, a conversation with you decides whether your members appear on the map at all.
Correct what is wrong
Records drawn from public sources contain mistakes. Telling us about one — or fixing it upstream, which fixes it everywhere at once — is a real contribution.