Viewer

The Viewer mode is the default mode of the interactive viewer. It lets you inspect and edit parsed map features, manage layer visibility, and draw manual annotations.

Toolbar

The toolbar at the top of the page provides the following tools:

Tool	Shortcut	Action
VIEW	v	Inspect map features. Click any object to see its OSM tags and properties in the sidebar.
EDIT	e	Select and reshape existing objects and custom annotations.
+ OBS	a	Draw rectangles, polygons, or circles to add manual obstacle annotations.
+ PATH	p	Draw custom paths or footways as line annotations.
DEL	d	Remove objects and custom annotations by clicking on them.
FETCH	f	Draw a bounding box to download and parse a new OSM area on the fly.
GPX	g	Upload a .gpx file to create a new map from a GPS track.
CLEAR		Clear currently loaded data.

Layers Panel

The sidebar shows a Layers panel with toggles for each feature category:

Layer	Colour	Description
Roads	Dark grey	Vehicle-intended ways from OSM
Footways	Yellow	Pedestrian paths
Barriers	Red	Untraversable features (walls, buildings, fences, water…)
Crossroads	Purple	Detected footway intersection points
Annotations	Orange	Manually drawn obstacles and paths
Waypoints	Blue	GPX waypoints from the loaded file
Robot	Green	Live robot position (visible when ROS2 is available)

First three categories also have an expandable sub-filter to toggle individual types. Use the Search box at the top of the Layers panel to filter features by OSM ID or name.

A base-layer switcher in the bottom-left corner of the map toggles between the standard OpenStreetMap tiles and Satellite imagery (Esri World Imagery) — useful for verifying annotation placement against aerial photos. The choice is remembered across sessions.

Properties Panel

Clicking any map feature in VIEW mode opens its properties in the Properties panel. The panel shows the feature's OSM tags, category, and geometry type. When inspecting individual nodes, the ⎘ buttons next to the latitude and longitude copy the value to the clipboard. In VIEW mode you can also open a feature's properties for editing via the context menu.

Annotation Panels

Three collapsible panels at the bottom of the sidebar track the state of manual edits:

• Annotations — list of all drawn obstacles and paths. The ↺ button reverts an annotation's geometry to the state it had when the file was loaded (geometry drags are saved immediately, so this is the way to recover from an accidental move).
• Changes — features whose properties have been modified since the file was loaded.
• Hidden — features that have been hidden from the map via the context menu.

Use the Export button in the toolbar to save all annotations and changes back to the .mapdata file. Deleted features will be removed from the file, while edits and annotations are added to it, hidden features are preserved.

Use the GeoJSON button next to it to download the same annotation-resolved map as a .geojson file, for opening in QGIS, geojson.io, or other GIS tools.

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Programmatic annotations

Annotations can also be created or inspected without the viewer UI by editing the sidecar .annotations.json file directly. This is useful for scripting bulk edits or seeding annotations from an external data source.

Add an obstacle polygon programmatically:

import json, time, pathlib

mapdata_path = pathlib.Path("coords.mapdata")
sidecar_path = mapdata_path.with_suffix(".annotations.json")

# Load existing sidecar or start fresh
if sidecar_path.exists():
    with open(sidecar_path) as f:
        sidecar = json.load(f)
else:
    sidecar = {
        "version": 1,
        "annotations": [],
        "deleted_ways": [],
        "hidden_ways": [],
        "tag_overrides": {},
        "split_ways": {},
        "deleted_nodes": {},
        "node_position_overrides": {},
        "change_log": [],
        "change_log_migration": "1",
    }

# Polygon coordinates are WGS-84 (lon, lat) pairs, closed ring
sidecar["annotations"].append(
    {
        "id": f"ann_{int(time.time() * 1000)}",
        "type": "obstacle",
        "geometry": {
            "type": "Polygon",
            "coordinates": [
                [
                    [14.5678, 50.1234],
                    [14.5680, 50.1234],
                    [14.5680, 50.1236],
                    [14.5678, 50.1234],
                ]
            ],
        },
        "properties": {},
    }
)

with open(sidecar_path, "w") as f:
    json.dump(sidecar, f, indent=2)

The viewer merges the sidecar at load time, so reloading the file in the browser will show the new annotation immediately. See Data Formats — .annotations.json for the full sidecar schema.