CreateMaps is built by Harald Körtge, a Berlin-based software developer working under Hekosoft. Harald has been building navigation, routing, search, and map-related systems since the 1990s, from the Palm OS era to modern OSM-based and automotive projects. PBFX is the compact dataset and query core inside CreateMaps. The project grows out of that background: geodata should feel searchable, inspectable, routable, and fun to experiment with, whether it runs locally or behind a small hosted server.
Harald’s work spans several generations of navigation software: early embedded navigation on Palm OS, routing and geocoding cores, OSM-based car navigation, compressed terrain and map data formats, lane-level ideas, low-resource search systems, and routing/positioning research for larger platforms.
That background matters here. CreateMaps is not just a UI experiment. It comes out of many years of thinking about compact storage, fast lookup, routing tradeoffs, map data limitations, and how to make useful systems work under tight resource constraints.
CreateMaps sits somewhere between map viewer, query playground, REST API, and geodata research tool. It aims to make fast exploration possible for questions that are often more interactive than traditional import-and-query pipelines feel.
The current prototype mixes free-text search, thematic map overlays, vector-tile styling, count and coverage outputs, GeoJSON/CSV export, local or remote REST clients, and routing profiles. Under the surface, it experiments with compact storage, block-level filtering, and pragmatic query execution for large map datasets.
A recurring theme across Harald’s work is doing more with less: smaller devices, tighter memory budgets, leaner systems, and practical solutions without unnecessary machinery. CreateMaps continues that line of thinking.
The goal is not maximal abstraction. The goal is a system that feels direct, fast, and surprisingly capable on real geodata problems.