Explore external web services for admin boundaries

[mkoo]

These may be better resources for importing or vetting our polygon data for countries and primary admin borders, especially if PG can handle JSON or other web-friendly spatial data. These would be new reference authority instead of wikipedia. Options include:

• GADM (contact Robert H.)

• Geonames (contact them about their webservices: https://www.geonames.org/export/)

This is an issue to bring up with AWG and GeoGroup and will follow our revamping of Higher Geography
Potentially impacts: #3102

[dustymc]

PG can handle JSON

There is no database involvement anywhere in this; the question is whether google's API can handle it. (Pretty sure the answer is that it can, and that it's easier than WKT, but we'd still need to convert everything.)

These would be new reference authority instead of wikipedia.

That does not make sense to me.

[Jegelewicz]

google's API

I think that GeoNames already does this.

See https://www.geonames.org/5687489/yellowstone-county.html

[dustymc]

If GeoNames has anything spatial for download, I can't find it.

I now have a box that can load at least simple shapefiles and I think any geopackage into the DB.

I can't find any single source of data that does anything that scales, so I've create a simple local cache-type thing that I can import/munge about anything into, rather than trying to deal with multiple sources.

I've got a rudimentary and not terribly integrated UI that'll hook shapes (and search terms) up to geography. I'd like to find some more data before I try to refine it much, but maybe that's chicken/egg territory. It works, it could work better.

The big issue is finding the intersection of their thing and our thing. For some places - Municipalities of Mexico, for example - GADM is really cool, straightforward, might even be scripted. (But our data is almost never that clean and this is a one-time thing so I'm not yet sure that's worth the effort.) For most of the planet and anything bigger than gadm's atomic units, GADM doesn't directly contain what we need. (I did not know this, someone please let me know if I'm just missing something!) Two ways around that:

1. Find other data. https://www.naturalearthdata.com seems to be the usual source, and it's pretty decent for the stuff I checked, but our "do random stuff" approach quickly comes into play - eg their shape for US includes Hawaii, while we've got Pacific Ocean, United States, Hawaii and North America, United States - nothing lines up because we have some crazy mixture of physical and political (and maybe some other stuff). I need to explore this more, they have other layers, it's a bit tedious to download/import/transmogrify tiny little bits and pieces, still seems worthwhile (unless someone has a better source of data they can share with me). They definitely do not have some of our "layers" so this can't be a full solution.

2. Stitch GADM-bits together to make whatever I need. I think that's technically possible - I can make eg states by stitching counties together, then eg North America/US by stitching states together and thereby avoid the problem above - but the command line isn't a great UI for that (I'd absolutely never know if I'd mucked something up), a real GIS would be very useful, and I think this would be pretty painful even there. Still, much of what we need (excepting quads, features, drainages, etc.) seems like it can probably be assembled from GADM, however straightforward that might (not) be.

This definitely seems useful, and I've learned some other good stuff along the way, I'll keep plodding along unless someone has some compelling reason not to, but everything would be greatly simplified if we could pick some sort of theme regarding what is and isn't geography - ideally one that someone else has adopted and has shapefiles for! - and stick to that, whatever it is.

I'm not holding my breath on that, so if anyone has, or has the ability to create, any sort of spatial data that might correspond to the things in Arctos, please pass it along.