Hi all,
I needed a country / state / city list for ShopClass, our open source classifieds app. Sounds easy but every option I found had a catch. Either the licence needed attribution or was share-alike, or it was a paid API with keys and rate limits, or the data was old and half the cities had no coordinates.
Why no other share-alike database considered?
See, I am happy to give attribution, buty anyone using my CMS for there website they need to give it too, which I think is a limitation. So I created this no-attribution dataset.
So I built our own dataset from Wikidata and released it as CC0. Public domain, no attribution needed, use it in anything including commercial stuff.
What’s in it:
• 255 countries and territories, 4,314 administrative divisions (states, provinces, regions) and 1,671,395 cities and towns
• every single place has latitude and longitude, if wikidata has no position for it we don’t ship it
• Wikidata QID as the id, so when you re-import a later release a renamed place stays the same row
• population, timezone, GeoNames id where known
• countries have capital, currency, calling code, ISO alpha-2/3 and numeric, flag emoji etc
How to get it:
• plain JSON, one file per country, with sha256 checksums for every file
• or call it from the browser or your server, no API key, no account, CORS is open: https://api.placedb.org/v1/countries.json
• there are prefix files for autocomplete too, so a city search box can work without a backend
• the pipeline that builds it is GPLv3 and the output is deterministic, same wikidata dump gives byte-identical files
Also, it’s not perfect and here is where:
• about 883k settlements are dropped because wikidata has no coordinates for them, mostly villages in China, India, Russia, Uganda and Myanmar
• names that exist only in Arabic script (and some other scripts) are not transliterated yet, so those places are missing a usable name
• Vietnam is undercounted
All of it is in the LIMITATIONS doc in the repo, with numbers.
Site: https://placedb.org
Repo and the full limits doc: https://github.com/mindstellar/location-data
If you spot a wrong place, a missing country division or something silly, please tell me. Happy to take PRs too.
submitted by /u/IamTheForth
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