Common geographical data and tools
The countries.data file contains one country per line, with the following data
separated by colons, when available:
- 2-letter ISO code
- Name
- Population
- List (separated with
|characters) of bounding boxes for geographical parts of this country. The first item is expected to be the part of the country that one would expect to see on a map, if no centroid (see below) is supplied. This is not always a great assumption. - centroid of the country.
The script ./update_country_boundaries updates a file country_boundaries.json which contains the bounding boxes (from Natural Earth) and centroids (from a Google data dump).
The script ./update will fetch country names and populations from Wikipedia, and the centroids from the above country_boundaries.json file, and rewrite countries.data. It doesn't yet rewrite the bounding boxes.
Prerequisites for the scripts are defined in requirements.txt which you can use with pip to install them.
This data is used directly in the map visualisation of global.health. The front end directly fetches countries.data from the master branch on github in the browser, and uses it to configure the map display.