All workSide project · Web tool
Cairn
A free web tool for finding a US map boundary in plain words, checking it on the map, and downloading it for Google Earth, a GPS watch or mapping software. It's built for people who have never opened ArcGIS, and it's quick enough for people who use it every day.
- Year
- 2026
- Service
- Product design, front-end
- Client
- Personal
- Built in
- Vanilla JS, MapLibre, Census and ArcGIS data
Problem
Public map data is easy to find and hard to trust. A normal search returns ten results with the same name: some are empty, some are tables with no shapes, and some label every shape with an ID number. Getting one clean boundary file usually means knowing GIS software.
Solution
Cairn understands plain words like "texas state house", opens and checks every result before showing it, and ranks the nearest first. It exports KML, KMZ, GPX or GeoJSON and shows the file size before you download. There's no account and no server: the browser talks straight to the data publishers, so it costs nothing to run.
