Request for Administrative Boundaries Relations Data

Help and support
1

I am working on a personal project that requires OpenStreetMap boundary information, specifically the relations data for administrative area boundaries worldwide. I attempted to download data from GeoFabrik, but the files are too large (100GB+) and require extensive manual post-processing. I also tried osm-boundaries, but it is not free and lacks batch downloads. Since I only need the relations data for administrative boundaries(for land only, waters not included), which I believe should be significantly smaller in size, I was wondering if someone could provide this data in a post-processed, easy-to-use format if the size of this dataset is manageable.

2

According to this page OSM-Boudaries is free for active contributors.

1 Like
3

You can use https://overpass-turbo.eu annd search for boundary=administrative. Adding admin_level=1 or 2 or … 10 to the search selects country, state, county, city, … level data

4

Please clarify: Do you need all of the admin_levels? That would be about 2 million polygons.

I think one relatively easy way to get all the boundaries is to use GeoDesk.

  • Download a planet file
  • Convert into a GeoDesk database file: gol build planet.gol planet.osm.pbf
  • Query for any boundary=administrative and export to a file: gol query --format=geojsonl planet.gol "a[boundary=administrative]" > osm_administrative_boundaries.geojsonl

This requires about 250 GB of disk space and 1 to a few hours of processing, depending on your hardware, though.

1 Like
5

Note that your “land only, not water” request also means you cannot use the relations as-is, you will have to intersect them with the landmass polygons. This can be done e.g. in PostGIS (after using osm2pgsql to import the OSM data - with a suitably filtered import configuration this should require less than 50 GB disk space).

Edit: Here’s a query to the “postpass” server that gives you a ~780 MB GeoJSON with all adminlevel 2 boundaries (i.e. country boundaries):

curl -ocountries.geojson \
   -g http://postpass.geofabrik.de/api/0.2/interpreter \
   --data-urlencode "data=
      SELECT * 
      FROM postpass_polygon
      WHERE tags?'boundary' 
      AND tags->>'boundary'='administrative' 
      AND tags->>'admin_level'='2'"

This takes 3 or 4 minutes. But as I said above, it will give you the plain OSM relation polygons, not intersected with landmass.

6

The basic tier is always free. The “Explorer” tier is free for everyone during the beta now, which includes territorial land polygons.