Geography (GIS) Changelog

May 20th, 2025

All notable changes to this project will be documented in this file.

If you have questions, please contact us by emailing our engineering team at [email protected].

March 2023

1.13.3 (March 27)

Added

Updated Backend Infrastructure.

August 2021

1.13.2 (August 5)

Fixed

GIS CA and UK SVGs now showing fg/bg areas.

May 2021

1.13.1 (May 7)

Changed

Improved internal error logging.

March 2021

1.13.0 (March 31)

Changed

/traveltime endpoint now allows for longer travel time with permission.

February 2021

1.12.0 (February 19)

Added

Exposed our /traveltime endpoint for more general use, see our documentation for more information.

January 2020

1.11.5 (January 31)

Added

Incorporated new authorization functionality.

September 2019

1.11.4 (September 12)

Changed

Transitioned to a new back-end data structure.

June 2019

1.11.3 (June 27)

Added

Area codes can now be requested as either strings or integers.

1.11.2 (June 24)

Added

Enabled the traveltime endpoint for the UK.

1.11.1 (June 18)

Fixed

Allow case insensitive path parameters.

1.11.0 (June 17)

Changed

Improved vector tile endpoint performance and visual fidelity.

May 2019

1.10.2 (May 1)

Changed

Upgraded infrastructural library.

April 2019

1.10.1 (April 11)

Changed

Updated how API meta and area validation is handled.

Removed

Removed several old US area versions that are no longer used, US data now only goes back as far as 2018.3.
Removed the postcode level from the UK, as it wasn't being used.

1.10.0 (April 9)

Added

The SVG endpoint now defaults to a natural breaks choropleth algorithm for color bucketing, instead of the quantile bucketing that was used previously.
The SVG endpoint now allows requests to specify one of three different choropleth algorithms for color bucketing via the new choroplethFill.algorithm property:
- natural_break – (default) for bucketing values around natural breaks in the data
- quantile – for bucketing values into approximately equal sized groups
- linear – for bucketing values on a linear scale
The color buckets mentioned above are determined by the choroplethFill properties positive and negative. The number of buckets defined in these properties will determine how each algorithm distributes the data into their color groups. See the SVG endpoint's "Full Reference" documentation for details.

Example:

Create an SVG with a linear choropleth of the 2018 population in Washington (53), Idaho (16), and Oregon (41). POST /us/2019.2/state/svg
```
{
    "width": 800,
    "height": 600,
    "codes": {
        "16": 1736797,
        "41": 4188154,
        "53": 7495425
    },
    "choroplethFill": {
        "algorithm": "linear"
    }
}
```

March 2019

1.9.1 (March 20)

Changed

Upgraded proxy web server.

1.9.0 (March 6)

Changed

Minor performance improvements.

February 2019

1.8.0 (February 13)

Fixed

Corrected invalid tile geometry in the UK.

January 2019

1.7.0 (January 23)

Added

Experimental New optional parameter on the MBR endpoint allowing the bounding box to cross the dateline. Useful for getting an accurate bounding box around Alaska in the US.
- Using the query parameter allow_crossing_dateline=true will enable this new feature.
- Defaults to false for backward compatibility.
- This feature is intended to become the new default when we have guaranteed everyone has switched over from the old functionality.

1.6.0 (January 23)

Added

Vector tiles now return a label layer in addition to a geometry layer.
- The label layer is named <level>-label where <level> is the requested area level (i.e. state-label when requesting state tiles).
- See example usage in the reference docs.

September 2018

1.5.0 (September 18)

Added

A new optional aggregate filter can now be used when querying the /centroid endpoint, which defaults to true.
- "aggregate": true : return centroids for all specified areas combined, or "aggregated"
- "aggregate": false : return centroids for each specified area separately, or "disaggregated"
Example 1:

Return the centroid of Washington and Idaho individually, or "disaggregated".
POST /us/2018.3/state/centroid
{ "codes": [ "16", "53" ], "aggregate": false }
{ "centroid": { "16": { "lat": 44.3890810004299, "lon": -114.659366113415 }, "53": { "lat": 47.3808263237037, "lon": -120.446553756083 } } }
Example 2:

Return the centroid of Washington and Idaho combined, or "aggregated".
- This request can also be made by dropping aggregate all together, since aggregate defaults to true.
POST /us/2018.3/state/centroid
{ "codes": [ "16", "53" ], "aggregate": true }
{ "centroid": { "lat": 45.7675450237783, "lon": -117.32584641163 } }