Roadmap¶

Honest about what is done, what is next, and what is aspirational.

Now — foundations¶

Putting conventions and tooling in place before the data grows.

Done — the Americas¶

55 territories, 95 datasets, 16,195 features. Country outlines from Natural Earth; first-level and municipal tiers from geoBoundaries under permissive licences only; Chile from IDE Chile.

Two of the 57 UN M49 territories ship nothing: Bonaire, Sint Eustatius and Saba and Bouvet Island are absent from Natural Earth under their ISO codes and have no permissively licensed subdivision data.

Coverage gaps¶

Fifteen countries have no first-level divisions here because their geoBoundaries ADM1 is copyleft — ODbL for Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba, Guatemala, Guyana, Honduras, Haiti, Nicaragua, Panama, Suriname, Trinidad and Tobago, Uruguay and Saint Vincent and the Grenadines; CC-BY-SA for Grenada and Greenland. Several of them do have a permissively licensed municipal tier, so they appear in the catalog with an ADM2 and no ADM1 above it.

Closing a gap means finding a national SDI or an HDX release under permissive terms — not relaxing the rule. See Approved sources.

Also outstanding for this continent:

Peru's districts — geoBoundaries stops at its 196 provinces
Verify the suspect unit counts before trusting them: Jamaica ADM2 (827 against 14 parishes) and Saint Lucia ADM2 (547 against 10 quarters) look mis-tiered and were left out; Bahamas ADM1/ADM2 (32/34) are near-identical
Guadeloupe, Martinique, French Guiana and the US Virgin Islands have a municipal tier but no ADM1 upstream, so they cannot be split
Issue and PR templates for country submissions
Translate generated catalog pages into Spanish

Next — the other continents¶

One PR each, reusing the pipeline: Europe, Africa, Asia, Oceania.

Later — global coverage¶

ADM0 for every country (Natural Earth is the obvious starting point)
ADM1 for every country (geoBoundaries)
ADM2 where openly licensed sources exist
TopoJSON alongside GeoJSON
Tagged data releases, and versioned documentation

ADM3 is explicitly not a goal at global scale. Very few countries publish it openly and the file sizes become unmanageable.

Eventually — the Moon and Mars¶

The conventions are already written, deliberately: the latitude convention in particular cannot be inferred from the data after the fact, so getting it wrong is expensive to discover and expensive to fix.

Lunar quadrangles, IAU 2015 body-fixed frame
Martian quadrangles
Named surface features from the IAU Gazetteer
USGS Astrogeology WMS basemaps in preview maps

Known data problems¶

Tracked, not hidden.

Problem	Where	Status
Antártica commune (12202) absent — 345 of 346	Chile ADM3	Won't fix; the official DPA package excludes the Antarctic claim
13 countries have no permissively licensed ADM1	Americas	Awaiting a permissive source
Municipal tier assignment unverified for ~15 territories	`scripts/countries.json`	Marked `verify` and shipped as `review`
Peru's districts unavailable — geoBoundaries stops at provinces	Peru	Awaiting a source
Legacy files still at the repository root	`comunas.geojson` and friends	Deprecated, removed in the next major

Not planned¶

A hosted API or tile service. This is a data repository. Cloudflare, jsDelivr and your own CDN do the serving better.
Geocoding or address data. Different problem, different sources.
Historical boundaries. Interesting, and a project of its own.
Sub-metre accuracy. These are administrative boundaries, not cadastral surveys.

Contributing to the roadmap¶

Open an issue. Countries where you have local knowledge of the authoritative open source are especially useful — finding a legally usable source is consistently the hardest part.