About

What this is

A public repository of open GeoJSON administrative boundaries, and the conventions that keep it coherent as it grows.

History

The project started in 2023 as chile-geojson: two files, Chile's 16 regions and 343 communes, converted from the Biblioteca del Congreso Nacional's shapefile set. Its entire documentation was a two-line README.

That was fine for two files. It does not survive contact with two hundred countries. The repository was renamed World-GeoJSON to reflect the wider goal, and the current work is putting the conventions, tooling and documentation in place before the data grows — so that everything added afterwards arrives in a consistent shape, rather than being retrofitted later.

The eventual scope includes the Moon and Mars. That is not a joke: planetary boundary and nomenclature data exists, it is openly licensed, and nobody publishes it in a convenient GeoJSON form. It does require its own conventions, because almost nothing about Earth's assumptions carries over.

Current state

Territories	55 (the Americas)
Datasets	95
Features	16,195
Bodies	1 of 3 planned
Data licence	Permissive only, recorded per dataset

Europe, Africa, Asia and Oceania follow, one continent per release. See Roadmap.

The four legacy files in the repository root predate the conventions and are deprecated; see Versioning & stability.

Maintainer

Andres Marquez (@andresgmg).

Contributions are welcome — see Contributing.

Licensing in one line

Code is MIT. Data is licensed per source, and some sources require attribution. Licensing & attribution has the detail, and it matters more than most projects' licence pages.