OurAirports data
- David Megginson
Summary: this article describes the per-country datasets on HDX derived from the OurAirports community open-aviation data site.
Source data overview
OurAirports is a community site where volunteers enter and update information about nearly 50,000 airports worldwide. The site publishes data in several formats, including per-country airport lists in CSV format, with or without HXL hashtags.
The URL pattern is
http://ourairports.com/countries/<code>/airports.<format>
Where <code> is the ISO2 country code, and <format> is either "hxl" or "csv". For example, the following is a list of airports in Columbia, including HXL hashtags:
And the following is the same list without HXL hashtags:
Note: This is no longer a high-priority dataset for HDX, though it remains the most-complete global airport listing available. During the early development of HDX in 2014, before we had outside contributors, this data was frequently used for testing and demos.
HDX datasets
HDX shares these datasets as live data directly from the OurAirports web site; there is no intermediation, and the data can change from second to second, depending on contributions to the source site. There is one dataset for each country, e.g. Airports in Colombia, and each dataset contains two resources (one with HXL hashtags, and one without).
Generating the datasets
The Python script to generate the datasets is available in HDX's GitHub organisation:
Before running the script, you will need to copy the config.py.TEMPLATE file to config.py and fill in the appropriate values.
Note that the script also depends on a Google Sheet containing a mapping table between OurAirport's ISO2 country names and HDX's ISO3 country codes. The sheet is publicly readable and available at
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1CuecXwSYOeW1fa7bqs00H3unprRCAxsYFB94a3O0-Ag/edit?usp=sharing