Hi all,<\/p>\n
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. <\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
What’s in it:<\/p>\n
\u2022 255 countries and territories, 4,314 administrative divisions (states, provinces, regions) and 1,671,395 cities and towns<\/p>\n
\u2022 every single place has latitude and longitude, if wikidata has no position for it we don’t ship it<\/p>\n
\u2022 Wikidata QID as the id, so when you re-import a later release a renamed place stays the same row<\/p>\n
\u2022 population, timezone, GeoNames id where known<\/p>\n
\u2022 countries have capital, currency, calling code, ISO alpha-2\/3 and numeric, flag emoji etc<\/p>\n
How to get it:<\/p>\n
\u2022 plain JSON, one file per country, with sha256 checksums for every file<\/p>\n
\u2022 or call it from the browser or your server, no API key, no account, CORS is open: https:\/\/api.placedb.org\/v1\/countries.json<\/a><\/p>\n \u2022 there are prefix files for autocomplete too, so a city search box can work without a backend<\/p>\n \u2022 the pipeline that builds it is GPLv3 and the output is deterministic, same wikidata dump gives byte-identical files<\/p>\n Also, it’s not perfect and here is where:<\/p>\n \u2022 about 883k settlements are dropped because wikidata has no coordinates for them, mostly villages in China, India, Russia, Uganda and Myanmar<\/p>\n \u2022 names that exist only in Arabic script (and some other scripts) are not transliterated yet, so those places are missing a usable name<\/p>\n \u2022 Vietnam is undercounted<\/p>\n All of it is in the LIMITATIONS doc in the repo, with numbers.<\/p>\n Site: https:\/\/placedb.org<\/a><\/p>\n Repo and the full limits doc: https:\/\/github.com\/mindstellar\/location-data<\/a><\/p>\n If you spot a wrong place, a missing country division or something silly, please tell me. Happy to take PRs too.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n submitted by \/u\/IamTheForth <\/a>
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