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Open Geospatial Datasets for GIS Education: This is a repository of open geospatial datasets to be used in an educational context. I created these files over years of teaching Geographic Data Science and GIS. All original datasets are freely available online with open data licenses (see the dataset attribution for details). All the datasets in t…

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Open Geospatial Datasets for GIS Education

This is a repository of open geospatial datasets to be used in an educational context. I created these files over years of teaching Geographic Data Science and GIS.

All original datasets are freely available online with open data licenses (see the dataset attribution for details). All the datasets in this repository have been selected, cleaned, harmonised, and repackaged for GIS exercises in a higher-education context. This is a pretty time-intensive process that other educators can hopefully avoid by using these versions.

Maintainer

Andrea Ballatore (King's College London) • aballatore.space

Disclaimer

  • These datasets are strictly intended for educational, non-commercial use.
  • The datasets have been heavily processed and simplified, removing some meta-data and details.
  • If you want to use these datasets for scientific research or commercial activities, please refer to the original data source.
  • If you think that my version of a dataset infringes its license, please let me know and I will remove it.

Datasets

All the datasets are in the folder datasets.

Dataset Data Spatial scope
airports Points Global
ancient boundaries Polygons Global
ancient roman roads Network Europe/North Africa
darmc historical shipwrecks 500bce 1500ce Points Europe/North Africa
digital elevation models Raster Global
dmsp ols nighttime lights 1995 2013 Raster Global
eu air quality 2016 Raster European Union
eu eurostat indicators 2005 2020 Polygons European Union
europe boundaries 1914 Polygons Europe
global air temperature 1950 2017 Raster Global
global historical earthquakes 1000 1903 Points Global
global precipitation 1950 2017 Raster Global
global trade network 1988 2018 Network Global
gpw global population density 2000 2020 Raster Global
london boroughs energy and pollution 2017 Polygons Greater London
london borough profiles 2015 Polygons Greater London
london deprivation index wards 2019 Polygons Greater London
london openstreetmap points of interest 2020 Points Greater London
london ward profiles 2015 Polygons Greater London
london travel origin destination 2011 Network Greater London
london underground network Network Greater London
los angeles census and deprivation 2013 Polygons Los Angeles County
tectonic plates 2002 Polygons Global
uk brexit 2016 Polygons UK
uk hexagonal grids Polygons UK
uk local authority districts 2019 Polygons UK
uk local authority districts cartogram 2019 Polygons UK
uk national parks and aonb Polygons GB
uk nations and regions 2011 Polygons UK
uk population estimates 1838 2016 -- UK
uk urban areas 2016 Polygons UK
wikipedia geo pages 2021 Points Global
world bank country indicators 2000 2020 Polygons Global
world country boundaries 2018 Polygons Global

Formats

All datasets are encoded in open formats:

  • CSV/TSV (.csv, .tsv): Comma or tab-separated values. It can be opened with R, Python, Excel.
  • GeoJSON (.geojson): Text-based geospatial vector datasets. It can be opened with QGIS, R, and Python.
  • GeoPackage (.gpkg): Single-file DB with geospatial datasets. It can be opened with QGIS, R, and Python.
  • GeoTiff (.tif): Geospatial raster datasets. It can be opened with QGIS, ArcMap, R, and Python.
  • GraphML (.graphml): Network data. It can be opened in Python with networkx and Gephi.
  • R dataset (.rds): Native R binary format containing a data frame or a spatial data frame.
  • Do not use shapefiles: http://switchfromshapefile.org

All datasets are smaller than 50 MB, in an effort to make them suitable for cheap hardware. Some files are compressed with gzip (.gz extension), which is available natively on Mac and Linux. 7 Zip handles the format on Windows.

Other great sources of free open geospatial data

When pages are missing, the Wayback Machine can help: https://archive.org/web

Last update: Jan 2021

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Open Geospatial Datasets for GIS Education: This is a repository of open geospatial datasets to be used in an educational context. I created these files over years of teaching Geographic Data Science and GIS. All original datasets are freely available online with open data licenses (see the dataset attribution for details). All the datasets in t…

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