MeetSpot Melbourne: data notes

Victorian suburb and locality suggestions:
Matthew Proctor's Australian Postcodes, bundled through aus-postcode-suburbs 1.3.2 (published November 2024).
https://www.matthewproctor.com/australian_postcodes
https://github.com/benjaminlai/aus-postcode-suburbs

The list contains 3,490 Victorian locality/postcode entries (3,333 distinct names), with approximate locality centre coordinates. Post Office Box and Large Volume Receiver entries, non-Victorian records, exact duplicates and invalid coordinate records were removed. It is a community maintained postal locality dataset, not an official register of gazetted boundaries. New or renamed localities may not yet be included.

Venue information was checked against linked venue websites in September 2026. Venue coordinates are approximate. The collection currently covers Melbourne, not all of Victoria. Up to five matching venues are displayed; restrictive filters can return fewer. Verified breakfast venues across the CBD, inner north, inner south and southeast, Greek venues in Glen Waverley and Oakleigh, and Indian lunch venues across inner Melbourne and Camberwell are included so common corridors are not dependent on community map tagging alone.

Outdoor or terrace seating is a ranked preference with three states: confirmed, unconfirmed, or explicitly unavailable. Confirmed outdoor venues rank first, explicitly unavailable venues are excluded, and missing seating metadata is shown as unconfirmed rather than incorrectly treated as no. Venue tiles show verified hours where available; otherwise they show the known meal service and link to the venue for current daily hours.

For every search, including “Anything good”, the finder requests nearby restaurants or cafes from OpenStreetMap. Cuisine-selected searches add a cuisine match to that request. Community-contributed venue names, cuisine tags, websites, addresses and opening hours can be incomplete or outdated. Discovered results are labelled and should be verified on their linked page before visiting.

The result gate first requires a venue to sit in the central portion of the suburb-to-suburb corridor and have reasonably balanced journeys. If fewer than five pass, a wider corridor may be used, but endpoint-hugging venues and severely uneven journeys remain excluded. The tiles label wider-corridor results. Verified midpoint-area coverage for the Cheltenham–Oakleigh corridor includes Seven Stars, Boundary Hotel, Comma Food & Wine, Third Wave BBQ and Wood & Bone, checked against their official sites in September 2026.

Cuisine fallback is conditional. If at least one selected-cuisine venue exists inside the between-suburbs corridor, only that cuisine is shown. If none exists, the finder recommends related cuisines from the in-corridor collection and clearly labels them as alternatives. The fallback never relaxes the geographic corridor boundary.

When available, the finder requests an anonymous driving-time matrix from the public OSRM routing service. If that lookup is unavailable, it falls back to a rough urban distance model with an allowance for the inner-west crossing. The finder compares driving time and distance only. Google Maps links open driving directions. Estimates do not include live traffic, parking or departure-time effects.

Map rendering: MapLibre GL JS 5.12, BSD 3-Clause licence.
Vector map and building data: OpenFreeMap / OpenMapTiles, with data from OpenStreetMap contributors.
https://openfreemap.org/
https://www.openstreetmap.org/copyright
The white basemap and 3D building tiles are requested when viewing the map. The suburb suggestions work locally, and shortlist selections remain in the current browser.