About NavigaTUM

NavigaTUM helps you find rooms, buildings, and locations at TUM - in Munich, Garching, Weihenstephan, Heilbronn, and Straubing. The project is open source and developed by students for students. It works without a login, without ads, and without tracking. It is not run by an official TUM department, but by a group of volunteers at OpenSource @ TUM e.V. - and maybe soon by you.

Where the data comes from

Good navigation lives and dies with good data. That is why we combine several sources. The foundation comes from TUMonline: buildings, rooms, organisations, and calendar entries. We import this data regularly and automatically. Along the way, we partially restructure it (for example for building complexes) and fix errors. We replaced the old TUM Roomfinder. Its site plans and room metadata live on in NavigaTUM as an archived dataset. A lot is curated by hand: coordinates, names, the search ranking, opening hours with a source reference per entry, and some hand-drawn site plans. Hints from the community often help with that.

The backbone of our map is OpenStreetMap. Building outlines, indoor data, points of interest, and many opening hours come from OSM. It is not a one-way street: improvements we make on the ground go back into OSM. Every other map benefits from that too. Map data © OpenStreetMap contributors.

Some content is live. Public transport stops and departures come from the community-run project Transitous. The current study room availability is provided by IRIS, the student council's study room display. Menus and canteen opening hours come from the eat-api, derived from the data of the Studierendenwerk. The information about the branch libraries comes from the TUM University Library.

Images

The photos of buildings and rooms come from the community. For every image, we record who took it and under which license it is published (for example CC0 or CC BY). You can view both directly on the image. Been out with your camera? You can contribute your own photos via the edit button on every detail page.

How to contribute

NavigaTUM thrives on people reporting errors and filling gaps. Direct corrections help us the most. You can fix wrong coordinates or names on every detail page. Missing entries can be proposed. Your proposal automatically becomes a pull request, which we can often merge as-is. For everything else, there is the feedback form on every page. It creates a public issue on GitHub whose progress you can follow. If you prefer working on the map, add missing details directly to OpenStreetMap. They automatically show up here as well. And the code is open source - we are happy to welcome new contributors.