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 2147595424 the full path of the record would be: 214/759/542/4/2147595424.json
Technically buildings are not part of the GeoPlanet hierarchy but they should be and so since the building=yes project has already reverse-geocoded most of the 26 million buildings present in the OpenStreetMap project so we'll just start with those.
Currently only buildings parented by airports are included in this repository.
Because buildings are not part of the original GeoPlanet data dump we need to create new unique IDs for them. We could use the OSM way ID for each building but then that risks colliding with an existing WOE ID. Instead we generate a new unique ID starting at 32 bits + 1 (or 2147483648) and increment upwards from there. Strictly speaking we could start at 32 bits and decrement on the assumption that GeoPlanet proper will never be more than 10 or 20 million records but that's not what we've done for buildings.
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.