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Changelog

Format follows Keep a Changelog. Versioning follows Semantic Versioning as adapted for data in Versioning & stability.

Unreleased

Added — the Americas

  • 55 territories, 95 datasets, 16,195 features. Country outlines from Natural Earth 10m (public domain); first-level and municipal divisions from geoBoundaries gbOpen, permissive licences only; Chile from IDE Chile.
  • Municipal levels are split by first-level parent. The parent is derived by largest-overlap spatial join, because geoBoundaries carries no parent reference and frequently ships an empty shapeISO.
  • Each dataset records its own licence, upstream provider and vintage. A country-level licence would be a false claim: Brazil's outline is public domain, its states CC BY 2.5 and its municipalities CC BY 3.0 IGO.
  • mapshaper is pinned in package.json and installed locally rather than resolved through npx on every call.

Not included, and why. Fifteen countries have no first-level divisions because their geoBoundaries ADM1 is ODbL or CC-BY-SA. Bonaire/Sint Eustatius and Saba and Bouvet Island ship nothing at all. Jamaica's and Saint Lucia's ADM2 were left out as apparently mis-tiered — 827 units against 14 parishes, 547 against 10 quarters. See the Roadmap.

Upstream quirks worth knowing. geoBoundaries' admUnitCount metadata disagrees with the files it serves in several cases (Suriname reports 62 ADM2 units and ships 58); the counts here are what the files actually contain. Argentina's ADM1 omits the Autonomous City of Buenos Aires, so its 8 comunas overlap no province and are kept in an unassigned part rather than dropped. Ecuador and Peru each ship an ADM1 whose shapeISO contains an asterisk.

Added — data pipeline and Chile

  • Chile at data/earth/CHL/, from IDE Chile's División Política Administrativa 2023 under CC BY: 16 regions, 56 provinces and 345 communes. The provincial tier had no openly licensed source before now.
  • The municipal level is split by region into 16 files so no single file is unwieldy, plus a whole-country file where it fits under the CDN ceiling.
  • Ingestion pipeline: fetch_sources.py, build_data.py, build_manifest.py, make_previews.mjs, and a curated scripts/countries.json recording which ADM level is each country's municipal tier.
  • All geometry simplified to a 100 m ground tolerance, recorded per dataset in the manifest. A distance rather than a percentage, so the whole repository shares one real-world resolution.
  • validate-data.yml — checks manifests against a clean regeneration, verifies split parts sum to the level total, enforces size budgets, and rejects any source.license outside the permissive allow-list.
  • Interactive preview maps, served from the docs site itself so they work under mkdocs serve and during PR review rather than depending on CDN propagation.

Changed

  • Chile's source moved from BCN to IDE Chile DPA 2023. geoBoundaries was evaluated and rejected for Chile: its ADM2 is OpenStreetMap under ODbL, and its communes are a 2020 vintage.
  • geoBoundaries is no longer described as a CC BY 4.0 source. gbOpen is a container of per-file licences and 33% of its Americas entries are copyleft. contributing/sources.md was wrong and has been corrected.
  • Natural Earth is now the designated source for country outlines.

Deprecated

  • regiones.geojson, comunas.geojson and their .json duplicates remain at the repository root, unchanged, for one full major version. They are not byte-equivalent to their replacements — different source, schema and resolution.

Added — documentation site

  • Documentation site built with MkDocs and Material for MkDocs, deployed to GitHub Pages.
  • Written conventions for repository layout, administrative levels, property schema, coordinate reference systems and planetary bodies.
  • Approved-source list and licensing policy, including the explicit exclusion of GADM and the share-alike problem with OpenStreetMap.
  • Disputed-boundaries policy.
  • Code of conduct.
  • Catalog generator (scripts/gen_catalog.py) producing dataset pages from manifest.json sidecars.
  • CI workflow building the site with --strict on pull requests and deploying to GitHub Pages on main.

Fixed

  • .gitattributes now pins *.geojson to LF line endings. Previously * text=auto caused CRLF conversion on Windows checkout, making the working file 1.8 MB larger than the stored blob and producing checksums that could not match Linux CI or raw.githubusercontent.com.

Planned — breaking

The legacy root files are removed in the next major release. See Versioning & stability.

[0.2.0] — 2023

Added

  • comunas.geojson — 343 Chilean communes.
  • comunas.json — byte-identical duplicate.

[0.1.0] — 2023

Added

  • regiones.geojson — 16 Chilean regions.
  • regiones.json — byte-identical duplicate.
  • MIT licence.

Source for both: Biblioteca del Congreso Nacional de Chile (BCN) / IDE Chile.