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Comment by malandrew | Hacker News Reader

So maybe I missed this in a previous conversation on Github's GeoJSON support, but what's the bigger picture here? I see a feature. I clearly recognize its utility. But, I can't seem to spot the larger trend that prompted this feature? Are there a lot of people using Github with GeoJSON files that are stored in the repo itself? If so, what are some of the use cases for this data being stored in Github? For some reason, I would have imagined that this type of data would be stored in a database and not a Github repo and that's what's confusing me.

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I think it makes sense in the larger open data, open government world: there are a ton of people using GIS data who would like the ability to version control, branching or forks but do not benefit from the massive overhead and expense of commercial GIS systems and do not have significant development skills available to build something complicated.

Databases make the most sense when your data changes frequently but if you have something like congressional districts, census information, etc. where the data changes infrequently but is likely to be shared widely the DVCS workflow and simplicity are really appealing. Right now you could do quite a lot with e.g. a gh-pages branch which contains GeoJSON and a simple LeafletJS viewer to combine files into layers; being able to quickly preview data files just makes that easier and it seems unlikely that they won't be adding some sort of diff comparison feature in the future.

There are a lot of public datasets that consist of raw GeoJSON data so that non-developers can easily view/use the data. As an example, http://github.com/slugis/incidents

Is there any sort of catalogue of all publicly available GeoJSON datasets available on Github?

It's not a catalog, but you can use the 'extension:' search option in the command bar.

https://github.com/search?q=extension%3Ageojson&type=Code&re...

Will give you all of the results, it definitely needs a slightly better way of searching.

Part of it seems to be a play to get more governments, who often have A LOT of geo data on Github. Github is in many ways positioning itself to be a public repository of data, not just code.

Speaking of that, among all the startups that target developers, I've noticed a dearth of startups that focus on providing database backups with versioning, including functionality for functionally defining how to roll back to previous versions of a database and merging or "rebasing" of databases.

d3.js is getting more and more popular, and journalism isn't getting less data-based.

Consider the last time there was an election. Those dynamically updated maps use this kind of file.

And without this support, shape files can't be viewed at all in a GitHub project, which is actually kind of ridiculous in 2013.

Furthermore, it encourages shape file providers to move their content to GitHub so we don't have the standard scenario of "download this .zip file and compile it to your preferred format to see if it's worth your time". It streamlines the process significantly.

It also gives them an edge over BitBucket. :)

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