Introduction
OpenPlanetData is an initiative to provide free, high-quality, and transparent datasets about our planet. Our mission is to make geographic data accessible to everyone while maintaining the highest standards of accuracy and transparency.
Why OpenPlanetData?
Section titled “Why OpenPlanetData?”Geographic data should be accessible to everyone, yet some providers make it unnecessarily difficult:
- Crazily priced datasets - Thousands of dollars for data derived from open sources.
- Difficulty debugging issues - When something goes wrong, it’s hard to trace the source.
- Download throttling or rate limits - Wait in line or pay for “premium” access.
- Outdated information - Datasets updated infrequently, leaving you with stale data.
- Uncertainty about data quality - How accurate is the data really? Black-box pipelines make it impossible to know.
- Vendor lock-in - Proprietary formats and unclear methodologies make switching costly.
OpenPlanetData takes a different approach:
- Free and open - No API keys, no rate limits, no strings attached. Just download and use.
- Transparent pipelines - All data pipelines are open source. See exactly how every dataset is built.
- Frequent updates - Automated pipelines keep datasets fresh with the latest data from authoritative sources, thanks to computing power provided by Ipregistry.
- Multiple formats - Every dataset is available in GeoJSON, GeoPackage, and GeoParquet.
- Fast global delivery - All files hosted on Cloudflare R2 for low-latency downloads worldwide. Thanks to Cloudflare for sponsoring R2 storage and bandwidth. Got an 8 Gbit/s link? You can saturate it — downloading our largest datasets takes less time than verifying their checksum locally.
- Community driven - Contributions, feedback, and collaboration are welcome from everyone.