Bounding boxes for countries

[fentas]

Hey there,
I found your repo and this source of data
https://data.hdx.rwlabs.org/dataset/bounding-boxes-for-countries
( source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:The_Anome/country_bounding_boxes )

I wrote a little wrapper to merge the data.
https://github.com/fentas/country-data-bounds

Pull Request as a result of this.
Adding "bounds" field as array with [ longmin latmin longmax latmax ].

Hope this helps as you mentioned it in Possible future additions.

[fentas]

I found a better source for bounding box.
https://pypi.python.org/pypi/country-bounding-boxes/0.2.3

I merged the data as follows:

• if there are no subunits the field bounds is a single array with [lon1, lat1, lon2, lat2]
• if there are subunits the field subunits will include all subunits + bounds is a multi array for each subunit (in order)

Within the country csv I separated the multi array with the char ';'.

[evdb]

This would be great to add, thank you.

A few thoughts, what do you think:

• perhaps the bounds data should be present in another csv, perhaps with columns alpha3,bounds,subunit and one row per subunit (so GB would get 4 rows).
• add some methods that let people search for countries by providing a coordinate, like the python module does.
• Clarify what lon1, lat1, lon2, lat2 means. I'd prefer something like west_bound,north_bound,east_bound,south_bound so it is clear what each one is (that order may well be wrong).

Thanks again :)

[niftylettuce]

@fentas did you see @evdb comments?