Recipes: instructions

Recipes are instructions for ingesting and transforming data.

They describe where the input data comes from and how it needs to be processed at every step (e.g. data ingestion, harmonization, curation, etc.).

Recipes are what makes openplaces scalable: the package provides an abstraction logic, and the recipes translate external data to that logic.

And each new recipe expands the analytical capacities of all other users.

Identifiers

Recipes are identified by their recipe_id, a concatenation of:

• Administrative units: geography (optional)

• an identifier of Entities: parcels, buildings, etc. or Datasets: attributes, and

• also optionally: a filename.

Examples:

Recipe ID	Description
admin-openplaces-2026_admin1	Global identifiers of countries/territories (administrative units, level 1: admin1). This recipe is a table
admin-gadm-4~1_admin1	Global administrative geometries from the Global Administrative Database (GADM) This recipe contains instructions on how to access the data
US_admin-census-2021_admin3	United States: official county (admin3) boundaries from the US census
US_footprint-microsoft-v2	US building footprints provided by Microsoft
US-NC_parcel-nconemap-2023	Parcel boundary data for North Carolina, United States, provided by NCOneMap

Location

Recipes live in src/openplaces/recipes.

They use the same directory structure as internal data directories: grouped by administrative units, followed by entities or datasets.

Understanding recipes

For an in-depth treatment of recipe arguments and functionality, see instructions on writing recipes in the section for contributors.