nearby_places

ai.mapmap/mapmap · Verify this server

Find places near a point, nearest first with distance in metres — by category (cafes, fuel, EV charging, parking), by name or brand ("the nearest Lloyds bank", "nearest Sainsbury's"), or both. Use this instead of geocode whenever the question is about what is NEAR a location: geocode ranks a brand's branches everywhere and only biases by proximity, so it will happily return a Lloyds in another city over the one 100 m away. Provide `lat`, `lon` and at least one of `category` or `name`. `category` is matched against the map's lowercased OSM tag values (amenity/shop/tourism/…), e.g. "cafe", "fuel", "charging_station", "parking", "pharmacy", "supermarket", "hotel", "restaurant", "fast_food", "atm", "bakery", "hospital", "station"; common colloquial names are normalised ("coffee" -> cafe, "ev_charging" -> charging_station, "petrol" -> fuel, "chemist" -> pharmacy). `name` matches the place's name or alternative names word by word, case- and accent-insensitively, with the last word also matching as a prefix. Combine the two to disambiguate a brand — "Lloyds" plus "bank" excludes Lloyds Pharmacy. A category or name the map does not carry returns an empty list, never an error. Optional `radius_m` (default 2500, max 100000) bounds the straight-line search distance and `limit` (default 5, max 10) the result count. Each result has name, one-line label, lat/lon, address parts, distance_m, categories and a `details` object of display tags (opening_hours, website, phone, ...) when the map carries them. Every result also carries `bearing_deg` and a spoken `direction`. Pass `heading_deg` (degrees clockwise from true north, 0 = north, 90 = east) and results are described from where the user stands — "ahead and slightly to your right, about 80 metres" — with a signed `relative_bearing_deg` (negative left, positive right); without a heading the phrasing falls back to cardinals ("to the north-east"), so this works with or without a compass. Add `fov_deg` to keep only what lies within that cone of the heading — it is the FULL width of the cone, so 90 keeps what lies within 45 degrees either side of dead ahead; anything dropped is counted in `out_of_view`, so a non-zero count means there ARE matching places nearby, just not in front of the user — say that rather than "nothing nearby". Prefer reading `direction` aloud over coordinates. Requires the MapMap gateway (GATEWAY_URL + GATEWAY_API_KEY).