Terms of use

Pilgrimap provides information about pilgrimage sites and public, read-only interfaces. These terms apply in particular to use of the website, JSON/GeoJSON/CSV endpoints and the provided iframe views.

General use

Published information is provided for orientation. Liturgy times, opening hours, access, accessibility, events, church status and local conditions may change at short notice. Before travelling or publishing information that requires a high degree of reliability, current details should be confirmed with the responsible church body or site operator.

Pilgrimap is an independent information service and not an official church directory. Content must not be presented as if it had been issued directly by a diocese, parish, religious community, shrine or other church body unless that is actually the case.

Permitted API use

The public Pilgrimap API may be used on websites, apps, maps, church information services, research projects, editorial projects and comparable integrations on a read-only basis. Permitted uses include retrieving published records, using documented filters, embedding the provided iframes and reasonable technical caching, provided cached information is not misleadingly represented as real-time data.

When data is republished publicly, Pilgrimap should remain identifiable as the data source. Existing source notices, technical attribution and iframe attribution must not be altered in a misleading way. Images, map tiles and other third-party material may be subject to additional rights and licences; API access does not grant additional rights to such material.

Prohibited use

Prohibited activity includes attacks or load tests without prior consent, automated requests at a frequency that impairs normal operation, circumvention of rate limits or other safeguards, unnecessary parallel bulk access, deliberately generating wasteful requests, exploiting security weaknesses, or attempting to obtain non-public data or write access.

The data must also not be used for unlawful purposes, spam or abusive contact, systematic harvesting of contact details, misleading presentation of modified records as unchanged Pilgrimap data, or false claims that Pilgrimap or a church body reviewed, endorsed or authorised a third-party application.

Traffic, technical limits and protective measures

There is no entitlement to a particular request volume, fixed request rate or unlimited availability. Pilgrimap may limit traffic by IP address, client, endpoint or time period where this is needed for stability, security, fair resource use or protection against abuse.

Suspicious or abusive traffic may be slowed, temporarily rejected or blocked. Automated clients should respect responses such as 429 Too Many Requests and 503 Service Unavailable, retry with appropriate backoff and avoid unnecessary requests through caching.

Availability and changes

The API and individual endpoints may be changed, restricted or temporarily unavailable for technical, security or editorial reasons. Versioned interfaces are kept stable where practical, but there is no guarantee that a particular endpoint, field or format will remain available indefinitely.

Responsibility when reusing data

Anyone integrating Pilgrimap data remains responsible for their own presentation, selection, freshness and context. Travel planning, event information, liturgy times, accessibility and safety-relevant information should not rely solely on cached data.

Use of the website, API or iframes must not infringe third-party rights. For large integrations or consistently high request volumes, prior coordination with the operator is recommended so that a stable technical arrangement can be found.