February 2024
Product Updates Coming in World Boundaries Premium
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Abstract
The World Boundaries Premium product will receive a number of important updates to the specification as well as additional content beginning with the September 2024 release. To help customers adjust to these changes a release preview will also be made available in the April/May timeframe. Changes are outlined in more detail below and further communications and documentation will follow.
Overview of Features and Functionality
The World Boundaries Premium specification has remained unchanged for a number of years. There are number of improvements and needed updates that will be combined together in a single update later this year. Here is an overview.
· Product Design Changes
o The current method of providing Display, Display Merged and Geotag will be revised to provide 3 extracts that are focused on 1) Display, 2) Administrative Boundaries and analytics associated, and 3) Geotagging
§ The new extracts will be called
· Admin Boundaries
· Display
· Geotag
o The number of available feature levels will be increased from 6 to 9
o The first 6 levels will be reserved for administrative boundaries
o The final 3 levels will contain Metro Areas, Built Up Areas and Neighborhoods
o The Display Extract will contain all 9 available feature levels and will have merged polygons using the same methodology as current Display Merged
o The Administrative Boundaries Extract will contain up to 6 administrative levels along with an explicit hierarchy relating each admin boundary to it's parent boundaries by name, ID, and administrative code. The polygons will be split using the same methodology as the current Display extract.
o The Geotag Extract will function and look much like it does in the current specification with only some field name changed noted below.
· Field Name Changes
o The Name_Level field will be promoted and renamed to Feat_Level to help indicate what feature level a given record is associated with
o A Feat_Desc (Feature Description) field will be added that indicates what type of feature is populated for that record based on a given country and feature level. For example, level 3 records in the US would have a value of 'Counties'
o A set of latitude/longitude fields will be added to provide centroid coordinates
o An ISO subdivision code field will be added to all extracts including postal to help identify not just the country but the subdivision of a given record.
o The LEVEL field will be renamed to POSTAL_DIG in the postal and high res postal extracts
· Product Format and Product Standardization Changes
o Product .zip file packaging names will align with our Precisely product naming standards
o Our documentation will be packaged and hosted online at help.precisely.com as part of our latest documentation standards
o The schema.xls document will be reformatted to match the latest Precisely standards
o The TXT format will see changes to align with our standard WKT format. This includes:
§ Changing file extension from TXT to WKT
§ Changing the delimiter from tab to pipe (|)
§ Field names changed to lower case
§ Geometry field name changes from WKT_GEOM to wkt
Availability
The product in its current format and specification will continue to be delivered for the March and June releases. The September release will be the first to be released in the new format. A separate/additional preview release showcasing all format changes and a sample of countries will be made available shortly after our standard March release.
Contact Information
If you would like technical assistance, please contact the Precisely Global Support team at https://support.precisely.com/
Any questions relating to this announcement can be directed to:
John Tagliaferro
Product Management Director
john.tagliaferro@precisely.com
www.precisely.com
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