location-data

A worldwide dataset of countries, administrative divisions and settlements,
built from Wikidata and published CC0 — plus the pipeline that builds it.

_{Every count above is read live from the published release. Nothing here goes stale.}

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Every settlement has coordinates. No region contains the same name twice. Two runs over the same Wikidata state produce byte-identical output.

Start here

# what is current
curl -s https://geo.mindstellar.com/releases/latest.json

# the catalog: every country, its files, their sha256
curl -s --compressed https://geo.mindstellar.com/releases/<version>/manifest.json

# one country
curl -s --compressed https://geo.mindstellar.com/releases/<version>/json/MT.json

releases/latest.json is the only URL worth hardcoding. It names the current version and its manifest; everything else hangs off that. Use --compressed — the edge compresses on the fly, and Mexico is 76 MB if you don't.

If you would rather not host it

Self-hosting is the point and always will be: the files above are the whole dataset, and nothing here depends on a service staying up.

But if you only want a country list in a dropdown, placedb.org serves these releases as static JSON — countries, divisions, settlements and prefix buckets for autocomplete — with no key, no account and no rate limit.

curl -s https://api.placedb.org/v1/countries.json

It is built from these releases and adds nothing to them; every response names the release it came from. It is a separate project, so that this one never has to qualify the licence below.

What a row looks like

{
  "type": "settlement",
  "id": 39520,
  "source": "wikidata",
  "admin1_id": 39520,
  "country_code": "MT",
  "name": "Mosta",
  "slug": "mosta",
  "latitude": "35.900000",
  "longitude": "14.433333",
  "population": 20241,
  "place_type": "Q515",
  "geonames_id": 8299734,
  "timezone_id": "Europe/Malta",
  "elevation": null,
  "alt_names": {},
  "admin2_id": "Q20199334"
}

id is the Wikidata QID, and it is the identity to match on when you re-import: an upstream rename becomes a rename rather than a delete plus an insert. Coordinates are 6-decimal strings, sized for DECIMAL(10,6). Countries carry a fuller block — capital, currency and symbol, calling code, continent, demonym, ccTLD, flag emoji, ISO alpha-3 and numeric.

Field-by-field fill rates are in docs/LIMITATIONS.md.

Three formats, same records

data/<CC>.ndjson	one JSON object per line — country, then each region followed by its settlements. Streamable in constant memory, which matters: the largest country is 76 MB.
json/<CC>.json	the same record as one nested document
csv/<CC>.csv	one row per settlement, flat

Every file's sha256 and byte count is in manifest.json, so a fetch can be verified. Files are named by ISO code, so a country renamed upstream cannot move one.

The data is published to object storage rather than kept in git — see docs/RELEASING.md. What is in this repository is the pipeline that produces it.

Why it exists

The dataset is built from Wikidata, which is CC0, and it is published CC0. You can take it, modify it, embed it in a product and never think about the licence again.

That is the whole reason the project exists, because the alternative does not allow it. dr5hn/countries-states-cities-database is the dataset most people reach for and it is a good one, but it is ODbL, which is share-alike: anything redistributing it owes attribution and must keep the derived database under the same licence, forever, through every consumer. For anything that ships location data inside a product, that is a permanent obligation attached to a table of city names.

So it was rejected as a source rather than used as one. Nothing here is derived from it — not the data, which comes from the Wikidata dump, and not the code. Its existence is the motivation, not the provenance.

Every decision below defers to the same constraint: no source carrying an attribution or share-alike requirement is mixed in, however convenient. That rules out GeoNames (CC-BY) and anything OpenStreetMap-derived (ODbL), both of which would close real gaps documented in docs/LIMITATIONS.md.

Where Wikidata alone cannot fill a gap, the fallbacks are chosen the same way. Time zones come from the IANA time zone database, which is public domain. Flag emoji and ccTLDs are computed from the ISO 3166-1 code rather than read from anywhere. Nothing here adds an obligation.

What counts as a city

The dataset is a city tier. That sounds obvious and is the single most consequential set of decisions here, because Wikidata's ontology does not draw the line where you would expect.

• Municipalities are a second class root. Wikidata files them under the administrative branch, not under "human settlement", so classifying on settlement alone misses every commune of France while happily keeping its abbeys and hamlets.
• Former divisions are excluded, including ones marked dissolved only by their class rather than by an end date. Over half of Japan's candidates were abolished municipalities.
• Neighbourhoods are excluded, suburbs are not. The two words describe different things. Where Wikidata uses "suburb" it is overwhelmingly an addressing unit — "gazetted locality of Victoria", "suburb/locality of Tasmania" — and an Australian address names its suburb, so a picker without them cannot express most Australian locations. Neighbourhoods are informal, overlapping and have no postal identity.
• Class exclusions lose to positive evidence. "College town" is a subclass of "academic enclave", which is a subclass of "neighborhood", so excluding neighbourhoods transitively deletes Bern and Basel. Anything that is also a city, town, village or municipality survives.
• Somewhere people are confined is not somewhere people live. Prison camps, internment camps and buried archaeological monuments are excluded even though Wikidata tags them as human settlements. Refugee camps are kept, and deliberately: Kutupalong holds 598,195 people.

What is guaranteed

• Every settlement has coordinates. A row without a position cannot be mapped, distance-sorted or deduplicated, so it is not shipped.
• No region contains the same name twice. A name identifying two places identifies neither, and a consumer picking from a list cannot see that the choice was ambiguous. Duplicates are merged where they are the same place, qualified where they are not — Aach (Konstanz) — and dropped where nothing can tell them apart.
• The build is byte-deterministic. Sorted collections, fixed coordinate precision, stable key order, and a version derived from content hashes rather than the clock. A scheduled refresh depends on this: a timestamp or an unordered set anywhere in the output turns every run into a spurious diff.
• Three things are frozen, because consumers store them. slugify() lives alone in contracts.py so that changing it is a deliberate act; COUNTRY_NAME_OVERRIDES pins spellings already shipped; the upstream entity id is the identity a re-import matches on. Adding is safe. Changing an existing value is a migration for everyone.

How it is built

pip install -r requirements.txt

zcat latest-truthy.nt.gz | python dump_scan.py --out-dir dump-scan
python dump_build.py --scan-dir dump-scan --out-dir dump-build
python validate.py dump-build

dump_scan.py makes one streaming pass over the Wikidata truthy dump (~982 GB of N-Triples, ~8.2 billion statements) and reduces it to what this build needs: about 1.8 GB of entity records plus the two graphs it cannot do without. dump_build.py then does all the judging with no network access at all.

The split is forced, not stylistic. Nothing in a streaming pass can decide whether an entity is a settlement: that needs the transitive P279 subclass closure, and attaching a settlement to its region needs the transitive P131 containment graph. Both are scattered across the whole dump, so classification cannot happen until the pass is over.

Budget on a 4-core machine: ~50 minutes to download the dump, ~90 minutes to scan, ~7 minutes to build. tools/refresh.py runs all of it, resumably.

validate.py fails on loss, never on growth. The check that matters is per-country: the global sums pass comfortably while individual countries are gutted, which is exactly how a source swap can ship an eightfold overall gain alongside a country that lost 98% of its cities.

Licence

The scripts are GPL-3.0 (LICENSE).

The data is CC0-1.0. A licence file stating so ships inside every release alongside the files it applies to, and the manifest records it in license.

The claim is meant literally, so it is worth saying what backs it. The data comes from the Wikidata truthy dump, which is CC0. Time zones come from the IANA time zone database, which is public domain. Flag emoji and ccTLDs are computed from the ISO 3166-1 code rather than read from any source. Names in non-Latin scripts are machine transliterated, which is a mechanical transformation of CC0 input and creates no new rights. No other source contributes a single field.

Before you depend on it

docs/LIMITATIONS.md is the honest account: coverage per field, the three real gaps (settlements with no coordinates, Arabic-script names, timezones outside single-zone countries), and the choices that are decisions rather than defects — disputed territories, country-level regions, territories shipping as countries rather than as regions of their parent.

docs/RELEASING.md covers how a release is produced and published. CONTRIBUTING.md covers what the pipeline decides, where each decision lives, and the traps that have already been hit.