Geodata data package providing geojson polygons for all the world's countries. Perfect for use in apps and visualizations.

The data comes from Natural Earth, a community effort to make visually pleasing, well-crafted maps with cartography or GIS software at small scale.

More info about countries can be obtained from datapackage https://github.com/datasets/country-codes by a join on field ISO3166-1-Alpha-3

To run the script and update the data:

1. Install required tools:

   • GDAL - for geographic data processing

2. Verify GDAL installation:

   ogr2ogr --version

The project uses ogr2ogr to convert Natural Earth's country boundaries from Shapefile to GeoJSON format, with the following features:

• Coordinate precision set to 6 decimal places
• Geometry validation enabled (-makevalid):
  • Fixes self-intersecting polygons
  • Corrects ring orientation
  • Removes duplicate vertices
  • Ensures geometric validity for better compatibility with GIS tools
• Selected fields:
  • name: Common name of the country (from admin field)
  • ISO3166-1-Alpha-2: Two-letter ISO country code (from iso_a2 field)
  • ISO3166-1-Alpha-3: Three-letter ISO country code (from iso_a3 field)

To process the data:

make data

This will:

1. Download the Natural Earth countries dataset
2. Convert it to GeoJSON format with the specified settings
3. Save the result in data/countries.geojson

All data is licensed under the Open Data Commons Public Domain Dedication and License.

Note that the original data from Natural Earth is public domain. While no credit is formally required a link back or credit to Natural Earth, Lexman and the Open Knowledge Foundation is much appreciated.

All source code is licenced under the MIT licence.