HERA · Human Entity Reference Atlas by Masego Inc

HERA · Human Entity Reference Atlas · Phase 2 Live Ingestion

Every country.
Every admin level.
Zero data loss.

HERA — the Human Entity Reference Atlas — discovers, normalizes, and packages public census and human-geography data for every country on Earth. Aligned to DGIWG SEL and CCL, cross-walked to Overture Maps via stable GERS IDs. Official sources first. Every field preserved.

216
Countries
25218823
Rows Ingested
49187
Fields Tracked
1929
Sources
216 countries live · 17 at admin depth 3+
216
Countries
2047
Datasets
2921
Census Tables
1929
Sources
7371
SEL Mappings
3584
CCL Mappings

Why HERA

Built for the Complexity of Human Geography Data

Every national statistics office publishes differently — APIs, PDFs, web tables, bulk downloads, restricted access. HERA handles all of it, and preserves every field along the way.

Official sources first

Primary data pulled directly from NSOs — Census Bureau, StatCan, ABS, ONS, IBGE, INEGI, INSEE, GUS, e-Stat, and more. Secondary sources (World Bank, WorldPop, DHS, MICS, HDX) supplement where needed.

Every admin level

If a country publishes at six admin levels, we create six tables — not one. 17 countries ingested at admin depth 3 or deeper: tract, ward, gmina, neighborhood.

Zero data loss

Every field from every source is captured in the DatasetFieldInventory. If the DGIWG schema can't hold a field, an extension table does. Nothing is silently dropped.

DGIWG + Overture aligned

Spatial/demographic data maps to DGIWG SEL; cultural/linguistic data to CCL. Admin boundaries and places cross-walk to Overture Maps via stable GERS IDs — every unit gets a persistent global identifier. ISO 19115 XML ships with every package.

Multi-format export

CSV, Parquet, GeoJSON, Excel, and ISO 19115 metadata XML — every country package ships in every format, with provenance, QA reports, and licensing baked in.

Site Selection engine

3,309 US counties scored for 10 business types: hotels, casinos, dispensaries, restaurants, warehouses, and more. Weighted by tax environment, regulatory status, and pending legislation.

Themes we collect

Every dimension of human geography.

From population and housing to religion, language, migration, and health — HERA captures every thematic layer that matters for defense, development, and commercial decisions.

Population & Demographics

Age, sex, race, household composition, fertility, mortality.

216 countries

Housing & Dwellings

Tenure, vacancy, rent burden, housing units, affordability.

US + 30 countries

Religion & Belief

Religious affiliation, practice, people groups, missions data.

Joshua Project · Pew

Language & Linguistics

ISO 639-3, genealogy, endangerment, speakers, literacy.

11,161 languages

Ethnicity & Culture

Ethnic groups, tribal affiliations, cultural practices, values.

17,000+ people groups

Migration & Refugees

Stocks, flows, remittances, refugees, IDPs, asylum seekers.

UNHCR · 31,800 records

Economy & Labor

Employment, income, sector breakdown, wages, informality.

BLS · ILO · World Bank

Health & Education

DHS indicators, UNESCO enrollment, literacy, attainment.

70 countries (DHS)

Products

Four ways to use the platform.

Data Sources

1929 sources across 216 countries.

Official NSO APIs wherever possible, bulk download and PDF extraction where needed, and secondary sources where primary data is restricted.

US Census BureauDecennial, ACS, TIGER/Line
Statistics CanadaStatCan API · 15+ tables
ABS (Australia)SDMX · Census 2021
ONS / Nomis (UK)Census 2021
IBGE (Brazil)SIDRA · Census 2022
INEGI (Mexico)Indicators · Census 2020
INSEE (France)Recensement 2021
GUS (Poland)3,918 gminy · depth 4
e-Stat (Japan)47 prefectures · 1,965 municipalities
World Bank50+ development indicators
UNHCRRefugee / IDP / asylum
Glottolog11,161 languages
USAID DHS70 countries · health & culture
Joshua Project17,000+ people groups
HUD & FREDIncome limits · HPI · unemployment
BLS QCEW8 NAICS sector expansions
HERA × Overture Maps

For everyone who builds on or buys Overture data

The human-context layer for every Overture division.

Whether you contribute to Overture Maps, build products on top of it, or license its data downstream, you get places, buildings, and administrative divisions — but no context about the people who live inside them. HERA is that context layer. We pull census, demographic, cultural, and linguistic data directly from national statistics offices across 216 live countries (with 216 configured and ingesting) and join every row to Overture using stable GERS (Global Entity Reference System) identifiers — the persistent UUIDs Overture assigns to every division so consumers can link datasets across releases without breaking joins.

If you're an Overture contributor, HERA is the enrichment layer your customers keep asking for. If you resell or redistribute Overture data, HERA is the value-add that lets you charge a premium. If you're building products on Overture — mapping, LBS, geo-AI, retail siting, logistics, risk — HERA is the fastest way to turn empty polygons into decision-ready rows. Building the 212-NSO pipeline in-house takes years of engineering across API, bulk, scrape, and PDF extraction paths. We've built the hard part. Plug us in.

216
Countries Covered
2921
GERS-joinable admin tables
25218823
Enrichable Rows
49187
Tracked Fields
17
Countries @ Depth 3+
Hook #1 · Census & Demographics

Official NSO data for every Overture division.

Population, age, sex, households, housing, income, employment, education — pulled directly from US Census, StatCan, ABS, ONS, IBGE, INSEE, INEGI, GUS, e-Stat, and 30+ more. Joined to Overture division GERS IDs at every admin level the country publishes.

2047datasets 7371SEL mappings 216live countries
Hook #2 · CCL (Overture has nothing for this)

Religion, language, ethnicity, migration layers.

Overture stops at the physical world. HERA's CCL layer adds the cultural and linguistic dimensions: religious affiliation, 11,161 languages with genealogy and endangerment, 17,000+ ethnic people groups, refugee/IDP flows, and cultural values. A category Overture simply doesn't carry.

3584CCL mappings 7cultural domains 11,161languages
Sample join · one line of SQL
-- Enrich any Overture division with HERA census + CCL in a single join
SELECT
    o.id                         -- Overture GERS ID (stable across releases),
    o.names.primary              -- division name,
    x.country_code, x.admin_level, x.local_geoid,
    t.population_2020, t.median_household_income,
    t.total_housing_units, t.total_vacancy_rate_pct,
    t.pct_english_only, t.pct_spanish, t.pct_broadband
FROM   overture.divisions   o
JOIN   hera.gers_crosswalk  x  ON x.gers_id = o.id
JOIN   hera.census_tables   t  ON t.id = x.census_table_id
WHERE  o.country = 'US' AND o.subtype = 'county';

-- gers_crosswalk: 3,311 USA county rows already loaded (release 2026-03-18.0)
-- Same pattern extends to every country we ingest (216/216 live)
GERS-ready join key

One-line enrichment

Every admin unit carries an Overture GERS crosswalk. Join on a single stable key — no fuzzy matching, no identifier drift across Overture releases.

✓ Synced within 7 days of each Overture release
Commercial redistribution

Clean license, full lineage

Per-field source, license, and provenance in the DatasetFieldInventory. Licensed for commercial redistribution — no ODbL share-alike entanglement from your Overture pipeline.

✓ 49187 fields · per-field license metadata
212 NSOs, one feed

Skip the 3-year build

Every country, every admin level, every field preserved. API, bulk download, web-scrape, and PDF ingestion — we already handle all of it. You get a single normalized feed.

✓ 1929 sources · SEL + CCL aligned
Explorer
Freenon-commercial
Researchers, students, academics, and OSS projects evaluating the catalog.
  • Web catalog browsing
  • API preview (1K calls / mo)
  • 5 countries, aggregate view only
  • Sample rows on request
  • No bulk downloads
  • CC-BY attribution required
Builder
$199per month
Solo devs, geo-AI tinkerers, and Overture contributors shipping a product.
  • 25 countries, full SEL schema
  • REST API + Python SDK
  • Bulk export (CSV / Parquet)
  • Commercial use in your own product
  • Email support
Commercial Plus
$5,995per month
Scale-ups and mid-market teams shipping on top of Overture globally.
  • Everything in Commercial, plus:
  • Team seats (up to 10)
  • Diff feeds between releases
  • Early access to new countries
  • Snowflake / Databricks share
  • Slack channel + 1-hour SLA
Enterprise
Customfrom $10K / month
Overture contributors, foundation members, hyperscalers, AI labs.
  • Everything in Commercial Plus, plus:
  • White-label redistribution
  • AWS Data Exchange listing
  • Custom country & field ingestion
  • On-prem · Named SE · DPA
Per-country add-ons: need only one or two countries? Individual country feeds available from $500–$2,000/country/year à la carte — ideal for vertical buyers (a hotel chain in SE Asia, a bank operating in LATAM). Annual billing: save 15% on Builder, Commercial, and Commercial Plus when billed annually.
Release-pegged to each Overture publish ISO 19115 metadata on every package Per-field lineage via DatasetFieldInventory Built for Overture contributors, data resellers & geo-AI builders

Ready to explore the data?

Open the world map or jump straight into Site Selection. Everything runs locally against the catalog DB.

Open World Map API Reference