Where On Earth (WOE) data for timezones smushed up with Eric Muller's
tz_world_mp shapefile for timezones. That's fancy talk for "polygons".
Forking GeoPlanet one place type a time.
This is an active but still experimental project to create a community-driven project to maintain and update the Creative Commons licensed GeoPlanet dataset.
Rather than create a single repository with every record the plan is to create smaller datasets organized by placetype in the hopes that they will be more manageable to download and to update by users interested in particular place types.
Each location (timezone) is stored as a separate GeoJSON file. GeoJSON was chosen because it has wide support in variety of GIS tools, most programming languages (and specifically JavaScript), can be edited using any old text editor (or Github's own "edit this page" functionality) and allows for any number of custom key/value pairs using the GeoJSON properties dictionary.
The naming convention for records is the timezone's Where On Earth (WOE) ID followed by a ".json" extension. Records are stored in nested directories that correspond to their WOE ID. The top level directory would be the first three digits of a WOE ID, the second level directory would be the following three digits (four through six) and so on until their are no more digits in the WOE ID.
This repository includes countries from GeoPlanet (versions 7.3 through 7.6) as compiled by woedb.
In the long-run Github may not be the best venue for managing all of these records. But it's not an entirely crazy idea either so we're going to try it for a while because it's easy and safe.
-
Build concordances with Geonames and Wikipedia.
-
Merge and update records from the GeoPlanet 7.10 release.