Reference

This reference documentation covers the product specification for all versions of Mapbox Boundaries. Data updates are limited to the latest version of the product.

Overview

The boundaries data product includes over 3,000,000 boundary features and is organized into various layer types and levels.

Geometry

The geometries for each boundary feature are available as polygon, centroid point, and line geometries within a family of vector tilesets that can be rendered and manipulated using the Mapbox GL library. Point in polygon querying can be done on the tilesets using the Mapbox Tilequery API.

Metadata

Extensive metadata for each feature is provided as Boundaries lookup tables which can be used to create data joins to the vector tilesets using Mapbox GL. Basic metadata for some admin and postal layers can also be fetched via the Mapbox Geocoding API.

Key fields

A globally unique mapbox_id is used as a primary key to identify every boundary in the boundaries tilesets and the corresponding metadata in the boundaries lookup tables.

If more than one boundary feature share the same mapbox_id, they will each have a unique worldview to distinguish between alternate representations of the boundary for local context. Features without any alternate representations are shared by all worldviews and will have worldview="all". A combination of mapbox_id and worldview will always uniquely identify a single feature.

Every feature is tagged with its iso_3166_1 code to identify the parent territory it belongs to. This is useful for additional data filtering and organization of features.