Getting basic data

The first data we will download is the administrative boundaries of our country of choice. Open data for administrative divisions are easy to find for the first two levels, but it becomes more and more scarce for higher levels. The first level is always the countries' boundaries, while higher levels depend on the given country. There is a great source for acquiring the first three levels for every country in a fine resolution: GADM or Global Administrative Areas. We will talk about administration levels in more details in a later chapter. Let's download some data from http://www.gadm.org/country by selecting our study area, and the file format as Shapefile:

In the zipped archive, we will need the administrative boundaries, which contain our division of choice. If you aren't sure about the correct dataset, just extract everything and we will choose the correct one later.

The second vector dataset we download is the GeoNames archive for the country encasing our study area. GeoNames is a great place for finding data points. Every record in the database is a single point with a pair of coordinates and a lot of attribute data. Its most instinctive use case is for geocoding (linking names to locations). However, it can be a real treasure box for those who can link the rich attribute data to more meaningful objects. The country-level data dumps can be reached at http://download.geonames.org/export/dump/ through the countries' two-letter ISO codes.