Country GeoJSON Collection
This is a collection of GeoJSON files of all country boundaries generated from the natural earth dataset. The data is derived from the Natural Earth 1:10m cultural vectors. Feel free to use these files in your GIS projects.
The generated list of all countries from the Natural Earth dataset can be found here in GeoJSON format.
Prerequisites
To regenerate the geojson files, ogr2ogr is used which is part of GDAL and can be downloaded here. In addition to GDAL, python and bash are needed as well. You get all this for free on a UNIX based system.
Usage
To make changes to the geojson files, replace the countries.shp and accompanying files with your dataset.
Run the convertShp2JSON shell script to generate a countries.geojson file.
The genCountriesGeoJSON python script extracts the countries out of the countries.geojson file. If run without arguments, the countries.geojson file will be read and everything is outputted into the geojson folder.
The python script supports command line options for customization purposes
./genCountriesGeoJSON.py [ -k <key_name> | --keyName <key_name> ] |
[ -i <input_file> | --inputFile <input_file> ] |
[ -o <output_path> | --outputPath <output_path> ] |
[ -g <admin_key_name> | --genReadme <admin_key_name> ] |
[ -f | --force ]
-k <arg>, --keyName <arg> specify the attribute in the geojson properties object
to use as primary key
this should be a unique identifier, preferably the country
code or another identifying value
-i <arg> , --inputFile <arg> specify the source geojson file to read in
this file should be a feature collection of country
geometries deprojected to WGS84
-o <arg>, --outputPath <arg> specify the output directory all geojson files should be
created in
-g <arg>, --genReadme <arg> specify the attribute in the geojson properties object that
contains the official name of the country.
The value is expected to be encoded in UTF-8
-f , --force if supplied, existing files will be overwritten
To generate the topojson files, you must have node installed and run the following commands:
$ npm install
$ npm start
Examples
The following example uses the python script given the following parameters
-
the primary key property in the GeoJSON is "country_code"
-
input file is names boundaries.geojson
-
the output folder is geo_data
-
a README.md is generated with the GeoJSON file with the admin name key being "country_name"
./genCountriesGeoJSON.py -k country_code -i boundaries.geojson -o geo_data -g country_name
The resulting geojson files should be stored in the geo_data folder (which must exist beforehand) with a README.md file that is also generated in the same folder.
Upcoming features
I plan to use the GDAL python bindings to handle the conversion of the shapefile rather than relying on the external shell script.