warmap

warmap turns a stream of news headlines into a live map. It pulls from a curated set of trusted RSS feeds — BBC World, Reuters, Al Jazeera, The Guardian and more — works out what happened and where, classifies each event, and plots it on an interactive Leaflet map with a filterable timeline and per-incident detail that links back to the original sources.

The pipeline#

Each incoming item goes through an LLM extraction step that decides whether it's actually a conflict or incident event, then assigns an event type — airstrike, missile, drone, shelling, ground, naval, casualties, diplomacy, cyber, humanitarian — a severity score and a short brief, and pulls out the locations and any movement vectors. I run this against OpenAI's Chat Completions API (defaulting to gpt-4o-mini), with a bounded pool of concurrent extraction jobs in the background fetcher so a burst of news doesn't overwhelm the model or the rate limits.

Getting the geography right#

Turning "an airstrike near X" into a map pin is the hard part. Place names resolve first through a local gazetteer, then fall back to Nominatim (OpenStreetMap), and I reject country-sized hits when the text clearly means a city or a base — otherwise half the map ends up as a pin in the middle of a nation. Geocoding is throttled to roughly one request per second to respect the public Nominatim policy, and results are cached behind a version prefix so I can invalidate stale caching rules cleanly.

Staying current without re-spamming the model#

Events live in a local SQLite database via better-sqlite3, which caches both the LLM extractions and the geocodes and persists the event list so a restart re-hydrates from disk instead of re-processing every feed. New events are pushed to the browser over a Server-Sent Events stream (/api/events/stream), so the map stays live without a refresh. On top of that it's a proper installable PWA with a service worker, plus a Markdown-backed blog, sitemap and SEO — the whole thing is Next.js 16 (App Router), React 19 and Tailwind CSS v4.