OpenGeographyRegions

A project to create a free, global, crowdsourced, multilingual dataset of geographic regions. Typical usecase is drawing an oriented label at an approximate position and shape.

This is work in progress, pull requests and other input are welcome.

Just draw a geographic region that you know, add a reference to wikidata, and sent your pull request. A basic geojson editor can be found at geojson.io.

Simple polygons, appropriate for different scales.

The project started with the 10m geography dataset from natural earth. There are currently 1050 features. The structure of the data can be seen here: Features

Linked Data

The integration of wikidata allows for internationalization in many languages and provides semantic information beyond location. Add a property wikidata with value "Q..." (wikidata id) to reference a wikidata object.

Open License

The license is CC0.

Data in GeoJSON

The data is available in GeoJSON. Here is the raw version.

Editing conventions

Feel free to draw polygons for areas that you know and propose them for inclusion. See CONTRIBUTING for more information.

Properties

Stick to this property ordering to avoid unnecessary history cluttering (the script is ensuring the correct order). Do not add additional properties without discussion. Major importance is on the wikidata item link, as the idea is to pull names in different languages from wikidata and not store them here.

• name
• featureclass
• scalerank (not sure this is needed, might be removed in a following version)
• region
• subregion
• wikidata

(the marine layer does not have region and subregion properties).

Regions

• Africa
• Antarctica
• Asia
• Europe
• North America
• Oceania
• Seven seas (open ocean)
• South America

Usage hints

Localized names

You can query wikidata for localized names with the script add_localized_names.py, for example ./add_localized_names.py input.geojson output.geojson de en fr it will get the localized names in German, English, French and Italian and add them as name_de etc. in the output file.

Labels

For labeling you can reduce the areas to a line, e.g. with PostGIS and ST_ApproximateMedialAxis or with the python tool label_centerlines by Joachim Ungar.