Trending GitHub —gods-eye-view from bilawalsidhu: a three-dimensional globe in the browser, which displays live open data. Airplanes (OpenSky, adsb.lol), ships (AISStream), satellites (CelesTrak), earthquakes (USGS), fires (NASA FIRMS), traffic jams (TomTom and OpenStreetMap), city cameras through open APIs of several cities, radio stations, bicycle parking, space missions - thirteen layers. Under the hood is vanilla JS, CesiumJS and Vite, a background of Google Photorealistic 3D Tiles, Esri images and OpenStreetMap. There is a cockpit mode with a camera tied to the aircraft, visual filters like night and thermal, voice control via the OpenAI Realtime API. Normal launch: git clone, npm ci, npm run dev. Licensed by MIT, incoming datasets have their own terms.
Valuable lies a level below the picture
The globe will go viral on social networks, and that will be the end of its role in your work. The useful part is thirteen different sources reduced to one grid of time and coordinates. Someone has already figured out that OpenSky gives one thing, adsb.lol another, that AISStream has a stream, and USGS has an upload, and that each municipality has designed city cameras differently.
The majority of time in any monitoring is spent on normalizing sources. Drawing is the last and cheapest step. Assembling the panel according to your systems - look at how the adapters are laid out and take the approach.
The second thing worth counting in advance: the one who launches pays. Most of the layers work without keys; the free Cesium ion key opens the backing and relief. There are two paid places - direct access to Google 3D tiles and voice via OpenAI. Voice control is charged by session time, so a demo that was “left open on the stand until Monday” turns into an invoice. There are no exact amounts in the README, and I won’t make them up: check the tariffs from the suppliers themselves before giving a link to the team.
What breaks over time
The live data demo is rotting. Public APIs change limits, introduce keys, close; municipal cameras are moved most often. In six months, some of the layers will fade, and it will look like your breakdown, and not like someone else’s dead endpoint. Put this inside the company - set up a separate liveness check for each layer and an explicit “source unavailable” signature. Otherwise, they’ll come to you first, and you’ll have to figure out someone else’s code on someone else’s weekend.
The main trap is licensed. MIT covers the code, not the data. Each source has its own conditions: in some places commercial use is prohibited, in others attribution in the interface is required, in others the frequency of requests is strictly limited. Forking a project into a product and selling it is the work of a lawyer in thirteen positions, and not a decision at a planning meeting.
Rule: for someone else’s aggregator, read the terms of each source, not the repository license.