CountryData

Open JSON data: one file per country, territory and historical state, plus a generated atlas site that shows what every record covers and what it doesn't yet.

• 198 country records and 63 historical states, empires, colonies and mandates.
• One manifest, data/index.json, lists every record.
• MIT licensed.

The previous layout (files at the repository root) is on the legacy-2026-10-29 branch.

Layout

data/
  index.json                       every record: slug, name, kind, group, region,
                                   path, formerly (its old file name), sections
  countries/<slug>.json            one file per country or territory
  historical/<slug>.json           states and empires
  historical/<group>/<slug>.json   possessions, grouped by the power that held them
                                   (british-, dutch-, french-, german-, japanese-,
                                   spanish-, us-possessions, soviet-union)
tools/validate.py                  checks the data (see below)
_src/                              the site generator (build.py, layout.html)
site/                              the generated atlas, deployable as-is
  data/                            a copy of data/, so the site serves the raw JSON
vercel.json                        static deploy, no build step

Slugs are kebab-case (united-states, saint-lucia). Historical slugs inside a group are prefixed with the group in the manifest (french-possessions--new-france).

Using the data

Read data/index.json first, then fetch the files it lists. On GitHub:

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/SolutionsAsService/CountryData/main/data/index.json
https://raw.githubusercontent.com/SolutionsAsService/CountryData/main/data/countries/france.json

Two shapes are in use. Most modern records have top-level sections such as Name, Symbols, Geography, Demographics, Government, Economy and History. Older records and the historical states use lower-case or camel-case keys (currency, period, predecessors). Some records wrap everything in one key named after the country. Both shapes are kept as written; the manifest's sections field lists each record's top-level keys.

Contributing

Edit or add a file under data/, add or update its entry in data/index.json, then:

python tools/validate.py     # every file is valid JSON, listed once, kebab-case, unique slug
python _src/build.py         # rebuild the site into site/

Commit both data/ and site/.

Known gaps

• Coverage is uneven: the atlas's About page counts, for each core topic, how many country records include it.
• china.json and china-prc.json are two separate records for China; they should be merged.
• Some countries have no record yet (for example Guinea).
• Two historical files were empty and were removed: Historical/DutchPossessions/DutchEmpire.json and Historical/Soviet/SovietEmpire.json.
• 19 files that were not valid JSON were repaired at the damaged spot, with no data invented: Venezuela's extrajudicial_executions had no value and is now null; a truncated Culture_and_S key line in the UAE record was removed.

Renamed files

Phillipines → philippines, Granada → grenada (the record is Grenada), Turkeye → turkiye, USPossesions → us-possessions, UK → united-kingdom, PRC → china-prc. Every old name is kept in the manifest's formerly field.