How to

Europe regions are complete on Elastic Maps Service

At Elastic, we are adding data layers to our Maps Service on a regular basis. We are proud to announce that we have recently finished adding a number of layers that complete the European continent for all second level national boundaries. The list of new layers are Albania, Andorra, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Czechia, Greece, Greenland, Iceland, Latvia, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, North Macedonia, Moldova, Montenegro, Romania, Serbia, and Ukraine. With this release, the total number of available datasets in the Elastic Map Service is 65

In addition to having the layers available for Kibana region map visualizations and the Maps app, this data is all available at our Elastic Maps Service page, where you can explore and download individual datasets for free. This is not just the boundaries and their geographical extent, but also the alphanumeric data associated with each boundary: their ISO codes and any other widely used region identifier, and their name representation in English and any other official languages for that country in particular.

North Macedonia municipalities are available with labels in English, Macedonian, and Albanian.

The data is curated using OpenStreetMap and Wikidata databases, two well-known open data repositories that are maintained by companies and individuals all across the world, including us!

The layers added to Elastic Maps Service are meant to be used by our community joining those geographies to their business data; all you need to do is use ISO codes as term join identifiers, unless other stable identifiers are available. For example, the Logstash Geoip filter and Elasticsearch Geoip processor will include these ISO codes automatically to help you aggregate your data by country or region.

Downloading and indexing the datasets, instead of using the Elastic Maps Service boundaries source, can be useful for those that want to leverage this information directly in their cluster, or for those that don’t have access to EMS on air gapped environments. GeoJSON upload would be a great resource to get this data quickly and ready to be used for joins, data enrichment, etc., but you can also upload them using the GDAL tool ogr2ogr as we covered in our Ingest geospatial data into Elasticsearch with GDAL blog.

We hope you’re as excited about these new boundary layers as we are. And if you haven’t used Elastic Maps, take it for a spin with a free 14-day trial of Elasticsearch Service.