Atlastory Base Map

Atlastory is the visualization of history on a map. The goal is to create a free interactive web map that spans all of history, with the ability to see what the world looked like 20, 50, or 1,000 years+ in the past. For further discussion and collaboration outside of GitHub, visit forum.atlastory.com.

This is the Atlastory Base Map, a political and cultural map that spans human history. To contribute, Fork the repo and issue a pull request.

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Contributing

Please read the Contributor Agreement before making any contributions. Below is more detail on the structure of this repo and the base map in general.

Best practices >>

Structure:

├── africa
├── asia
│   ├── admin-1
│   │   ├── 1871-1900.geojson
│   │   └── 1900-1910.geojson
│   └── admin-2
│       └── 1900-1920.geojson
├── central-america
└── central-asia

1. Regions — the region of the world
2. Types — each folder is a map type level
3. Time periods — each type folder has GeoJSONs representing the time period for that data

(1) Regions

General split lines:

1. north-america: North America (+Greenland)
2. central-america: Central America (+Caribbean)
3. south-america: South America
4. africa: Africa
5. europe: Europe
6. middle-east: Middle East
7. central-asia: Central Asia (+Russia)
8. asia: Asia (+Southeast Asia)
9. oceania: Australia, NZ, Pacific
10. antarctica : Antarctica

Each region will later be combined to form a global map. So the split doesn't need to be exactly down these lines -- as long as 2 GeoJSON files in the same period don't replicate a shape. So Ukraine can be included in central-asia in one period and europe in another.

(2) Shape types (level-name object type — Shape type(s))

• admin-1 polygon — sovereignty, country, dependency, colony
• admin-2 polygon — state, province, republic, ...
• admin-3 polygon — county, ...
• settlement point — city, capital-[1-3], town, village

(3) Time periods (GeoJSON)

• Must be in GeoJSON format (projection is always WGS 84 (4326))
• Periods can be any length in 1-year intervals.
• Years begin and end on January 1. So the file 1940-1945 goes from January 1, 1940 to January 1, 1945. The file 1945-1946 spans the one-year period January 1, 1945 to January 1, 1946.
• Periods can be changed to whatever necessary as the map data changes over time.
• Periods should never overlap within the same type.
  • Correct: 1850-1855, 1855-1861, 1861-1864, 1875-1880
  • Incorrect: 1850-1855, 1853-1861, 1860-1864, 1875-1880

Common data attributes:

• name full name
• name_md medium name abbreviation <= 17 characters
• name_sm short name abbreviation <=5 characters
• type see 'Shape types' above (sovereignty, city, etc.)
• sovereignty full name of sovereign country (if applicable)
• description
• date_start specific start date YYYY-MM-DD of object (if present)
• date_end specific end date YYYY-MM-DD of object (if present)
• _color (required for admin-1 shape type) specify the number representing the color of the sovereignty's tint band
  1. Turquoise
  2. Green
  3. Lime
  4. Yellow
  5. Orange
  6. Red
  7. Purple