Data sources
SkiBase records ski-area infrastructure from OpenStreetMap geometry and, separately, official advertised facts from ski-area and operator sources. Those two numbers can differ. SkiBase keeps both, with provenance, instead of collapsing them into one unexplained figure.
Official figures
Official piste kilometres, lift counts, elevation, season dates and ski-pass prices come from the ski area or operating company when a verified official website can be parsed. Public ticket shops linked from the operator site, including a different hostname, may be used when ownership and product scope are clear. Tourism aggregators and competitor databases are not used as authority. Missing prices stay unknown.
Ski-pass prices
The comparison headline is the current standard adult 1-day ticket: no guest card, residency, student or family discount. Ticket-office prices are preferred over online prices when both exist. A regional pass (for example Ski amadé) may be the ticket required to ski an area; SkiBase labels that scope instead of treating it as a local-only product. Dynamic shops may only publish a “from” price — SkiBase does not sample a winter calendar to invent a range.
Mapped figures
Mapped piste distance is the sum of OpenStreetMap piste geometry assigned to the ski area. Mapped lift counts are OSM ski-relevant lifts. They are rebuildable from the OSM snapshot and are never overwritten by an official ingest.
Why the numbers differ
Official advertised kilometres may exclude ski routes, count prepared runs differently, or use a commercial domain total. OSM mapping may include extra ways, omit unmarked connections, or split pistes differently. Neither value is treated as an error solely because it disagrees.
How matching works
/match/ is not a global ranking. You set how important price, size, lifts, fresh snow, official altitude and summit wind are for this trip. SkiBase normalizes each known metric with a published curve, then weights only the priorities you selected. Missing values are left out of that area’s calculation — they are not treated as zero or as average. Data coverage is shown separately from the match percent. There is no SkiBase Score.
Cross-border areas
A Geofabrik extract is a geometry source, not canonical country identity. SkiBase classifies representative ski-area geometry against country polygons (Eurostat GISCO), then assigns one primary country for the canonical URL. Additional countries are membership (mapped infrastructure or commercial scope), not a second page. Silvretta Arena (Ischgl/Samnaun) stays on its Austrian URL and can appear in Switzerland listings with a link to that same page. Mapped piste and lift counts are not doubled. If official identity includes a country SkiBase has not imported, mapped figures are labelled partial — SkiBase does not invent the missing extract. Clipped neighbour geometry that only appeared inside another country's extract is not published under that extract country.
Regions and cantons
Country identity and region identity are separate. Mapped piste length inside administrative boundaries is the strongest automatic signal for a canonical canton, Bundesland or French région. One nearby village or GeoNames row cannot move a ski area into the wrong region. If no region is confidently known, the public URL stays at country level and the area can still be published. Multi-region areas keep one canonical URL and may appear on secondary region lists when mapped membership is meaningful. France uses région, not département, as the public admin1 layer.
France
France is a launched SkiBase country. A France OSM extract is a geometry source, not canonical French identity. Cross-border domains keep one canonical country URL; French listings may link to a Swiss or Austrian page when that country is primary. Mapped coverage is complete when every country in the commercial identity is imported and mapped. It is partial when a commercial identity includes a country SkiBase has not imported — mapped figures then describe only the imported side. Official statistics may still describe the full commercial domain. SkiBase does not invent missing Italian geometry. Clipped neighbour geometry that only appeared inside another country's extract is not published under that extract country.
Commercial identity
A commercial ski domain may aggregate child sectors without its own authoritative polygon. Tree statistics count each piste and lift once. Tourism marketing regions, department boards, and regional federation passes are not treated as one ski area. Child sectors keep their own pages when they have independent operating identity.
Weather
Public ski-area pages may show an elevation-aware forecast from the Open-Meteo customer API at base, mid-mountain and summit sampling points derived from mapped ski infrastructure. Those values are model forecasts. They are not official resort snow reports or live lift status.