Where On Earth (WOE) data for countries smushed up with Natural Earth (NE) 1:10m data for countries. That's fancy talk for "polygons".
It's still a bit of a moving target, specifically formatting and normalizing ket
names in the properties hash. For example, all the NE property keys are
prefixed with ne:. Most but not all the records have NE geometries associated
with them.
Things like the "Hong Kong Special Administrative Region" which ... uh ... uh, well yeah. This is why we still have wars and stuff, isn't it? Those are the kinds of fiddly details that still need to be worked out.
Suggestions and gentle cluebats are absolutely welcome.
Where possible corresponding Wikipedia page IDs have been added. I'd also really like to include Geonames IDs since that would be both easy and useful. Please for to be sending me a pull request if you've already got that data at hand.
Forking GeoPlanet one place type a time.
This is an active but still experimental project to create a community-driven project to maintain and update the Creative Commons licensed GeoPlanet dataset.
Rather than create a single repository with every record the plan is to create smaller datasets organized by placetype in the hopes that they will be more manageable to download and to update by users interested in particular place types.
Each location (country) is stored as a separate GeoJSON file. GeoJSON was chosen because it has wide support in variety of GIS tools, most programming languages (and specifically JavaScript), can be edited using any old text editor (or Github's own "edit this page" functionality) and allows for any number of custom key/value pairs using the GeoJSON properties dictionary.
The naming convention for records is the country's Where On Earth (WOE) ID followed by a ".json" extension. Records are stored in nested directories that correspond to their WOE ID. The top level directory would be the first three digits of a WOE ID, the second level directory would be the following three digits (four through six) and so on until their are no more digits in the WOE ID.
This repository includes countries from GeoPlanet (versions 7.3 through 7.6) as compiled by woedb. Where possible records have already been updated to include corresponding concordances, for example Wikipedia or Geonames IDs.
Each record contains a bounding box or a complex polygon defining the contour of the country. Polygons are sourced from the August 2012 release of the Natural Earth 1:10m country boundaries.
In the long-run Github may not be the best venue for managing all of these records. But it's not an entirely crazy idea either so we're going to try it for a while because it's easy and safe.