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 (building) 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 building'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. For example, given the WOE ID ID 12521721 the full path of the record would be: data/125/217/21/12521721.json
This repository includes airports from GeoPlanet (versions 7.3 through 7.6) as compiled by woedb. Where possible records have already been updated to include corresponding FAA, ICAO, IATA and Geonames IDs. Coverage is far from complete. Records have been cross-referenced against the whereonearth-building repository and pointers to buildings parented by individual airports have been added.
Each record contains a bounding box or a complex polygon defining the contour of the airport. Polygons are sourced from the January 2010 release of the Flickr Alpha Shapes.
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.