I've cleaned the dataset ✨

[Uspectacle]

Hello everyone,

First, a big thank you to @aourednik for creating and sharing this amazing project 🙏. Historical-basemaps has been an inspiring resource for exploring geopolitical history, and many of us benefit from it.

While working with the dataset, I ran into some issues, so I created a cleaned version of the database. If you are using the maps and encounter similar problems, you might find the cleaned dataset helpful:

👉 https://github.com/Uspectacle/historical-basemaps-cleaned

Main fixes include:

• Standardized entity NAME values to reduce duplicates and variants
• Removed unknown features
• Renamed properties to be snake_case friendly
• Removed ABRV and SUBJECTO, which seemed redundant
• Used Gemini to generate a correction map for canonical naming and more accurate PART_OF values

This is not a fork trying to replace the original project — just a community contribution to make it easier to use in scripts and analysis.

If you find bugs or improvements, feel free to use the cleaned version or share feedback so we can all benefit. And of course, if at any point @aourednik would like to use the cleaned data to improve the original database, that would be wonderful.

⚠️ Note: I am not a historian, and I used AI assistance to build this project. That said, I do believe the final result is overall more consistent and usable than the current dataset.

Thanks again to the original author and to everyone here who keeps this project alive 🌍