Property dictionary

Every property key that appears anywhere in the corpus, what it means, and whether it is standard.

Standard properties

Defined by this project and present on every feature. See Property schema.

Key	Type	Meaning
shapeName	string	Local-language name, with diacritics
shapeISO	string	Official code — ISO 3166-2 where one exists, otherwise the national code
shapeGroup	string	ISO 3166-1 alpha-3 of the country, or body code
shapeType	string	ADM0–ADM3 or QUAD
parentISO	string	shapeISO of the immediate parent unit
adm1ISO	string	ISO 3166-2 of the ADM1 the feature belongs to. Present on split municipal levels, where it names the file the feature lives in
shapeID	string	{shapeGroup}-{shapeType}-{shapeISO}
shapeNameEn	string	English exonym, where meaningfully different

parentISO and adm1ISO are not the same thing

On a Chilean commune, parentISO is its province — the immediate parent in the official hierarchy — while adm1ISO is its region, which is what the file is keyed by. Both are useful and both are recorded.

Source properties — Chile

Preserved from IDE Chile's DPA 2023 under the src_ prefix.

Key	Type	Meaning
src_cut_com	string	CUT commune code, five characters, zero-padded
src_cut_prov	string	CUT province code, three characters
src_cut_reg	string	CUT region code, two characters
src_provincia	string	Province name
src_region	string	Region name
src_superficie_km2	number	Official area in square kilometres

CUT (Código Único Territorial) is the national territorial coding scheme used by INE and SUBDERE. Codes nest: commune 01402 sits in province 011, which sits in region 01.

Source properties — geoBoundaries

Countries taken from geoBoundaries carry its five native fields. Four of them already match the standard vocabulary, which is why this project adopted it.

Key	Note
shapeName, shapeGroup, shapeType	Used directly
shapeISO	Frequently empty. geoBoundaries documents it as "where available", and in practice many countries ship ""
shapeID	An opaque internal identifier, not a territorial code

Properties that get dropped

Export artifacts from the source GIS software. They carry no information that cannot be recomputed, and they mislead.

Key	Why it goes
objectid	An Esri internal row number. Not stable across exports
st_area_sh	Precomputed area in square metres, from an unstated projection
st_length_	Precomputed perimeter, same problem
shape_leng	Duplicate of st_length_, truncated to the dBase 10-character field limit

Known traps

Territorial codes must be strings

A JSON number cannot hold a leading zero, so any source storing Chile's 01402 as an integer silently yields 1402, and joins against official statistics match nothing. shapeISO and every src_cut_* field are strings.

shapeISO may be empty on geoBoundaries data

Do not assume it is populated. Use shapeName for display and shapeID for identity when the ISO code is missing.

The GeoJSON id member is not used

Identity lives in properties. Files in this repository do not rely on the top-level id member, and consumers should not either.

Regenerating this page

Property lists are recorded per dataset in each manifest.json. This page is maintained by hand; generating it from the manifests is on the Roadmap.