Reference

These pages define how data in this repository is organised. They are the contract: a contribution that follows them can be merged; one that does not cannot, no matter how good the underlying geometry is.

They exist because the project is scaling from one country to potentially two hundred. Two files with ad-hoc property names are merely untidy; four hundred files with ad-hoc property names are unusable.

At a glance

Question	Answer	Detail
Where does a file go?	data/{body}/{ISO3}/{ISO3}_{LEVEL}.geojson	Naming
What is ADM1?	First-level divisions, whatever they are called locally	Admin levels
What properties must a feature have?	shapeName, shapeISO, shapeGroup, shapeType	Schema
What coordinate system?	OGC:CRS84 (≡ EPSG:4326), longitude first	CRS
May a file declare its own CRS?	No. RFC 7946 removed that member	CRS
How do the Moon and Mars work?	IAU 2015 body-fixed frames, no ISO codes	Planetary
Where does catalog metadata come from?	manifest.json beside the data	Manifest

Conformance language

These pages use must, should and may in the RFC 2119 sense. "Must" is enforced in review and, where practical, in CI.

The legacy files

Everything under data/ follows these conventions. The four files still sitting in the repository root — regiones.geojson, comunas.geojson and their .json duplicates — do not: they predate the conventions entirely.

They remain in place, unchanged, for one full major version so that existing deep links keep working, and they are deprecated. Use data/earth/CHL/.

See Versioning & stability for the removal schedule.