Reference data

Kancil ships a set of lookup tables that are not your data: countries, regions, cities and languages. They exist so that a place recorded in one part of the app means the same thing everywhere else.

Where it comes from

Countries, regions and cities come from GeoNames, the open geographical database. Regions are its admin1 subdivisions — the first level below a country, which is a province, state, or provincie depending on where you are standing.

The data is imported, not fetched live. That is what makes it usable as reference data: a city id is stable, and lookups do not depend on an external service being up. Refreshing an import is an admin operation and it is audited.

What it is shared for

Unlike almost everything else in Kancil, reference data is not owned by an account — everyone on the instance sees the same tables. Two people recording "Utrecht" record the same city, which is the entire point. If it were per-user you would get one Utrecht per person and no way to compare them.

Cities

Cities is the largest table and the one with real filters: free-text search, country, region, and a minimum population cut. That last one is the practical one — GeoNames is exhaustive, including hamlets of forty people, and without a population floor a search for a common name returns dozens of places nobody means.

Each city has a detail page carrying its identifiers and its position in the country/region hierarchy.

Languages

A plain list, used where a language has to be recorded consistently rather than typed.

Using it

Reference data is read-only in normal use — you select from it, you do not add to it. If something is missing, that is an import question rather than a data entry one, and it is handled from the admin side.

Browse it in Locations.