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.
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.
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.
If a country publishes at six admin levels, we create six tables — not one. 56 countries ingested at admin depth 3 or deeper: tract, ward, gmina, neighborhood.
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.
Spatial/demographic data maps to DGIWG SEL; cultural/linguistic data to CCL. Admin boundaries and places are built to cross-walk to Overture Maps via stable GERS IDs (US counties crosswalked today, expanding with GERS coverage). ISO 19115 XML ships with every package.
CSV, Parquet, GeoJSON, Excel, and ISO 19115 metadata XML — every country package ships in every format, with provenance, QA reports, and licensing baked in.
3,311 US counties scored for 15 business types: hotels, casinos, dispensaries, restaurants, warehouses, and more. Weighted by tax environment, regulatory status, and pending legislation.
From population and housing to religion, language, migration, and health — HERA captures every thematic layer that matters for defense, development, and commercial decisions.
Age, sex, race, household composition, fertility, mortality.
Tenure, vacancy, rent burden, housing units, affordability.
Religious affiliation, denominations, practice rates, ecclesiastical bodies.
ISO 639-3, genealogy, endangerment, speakers, literacy.
Ethnic groups, tribal affiliations, cultural practices, values.
Stocks, flows, remittances, refugees, IDPs, asylum seekers.
Employment, income, sector breakdown, wages, informality.
DHS indicators, UNESCO enrollment, literacy, attainment.
Interactive SEL/CCL world map. Drill into any country, inspect ingested admin levels, datasets, field inventory, and download packaged exports.
Rank every US county for hotels, casinos, dispensaries, restaurants, manufacturing, warehousing, and more. Tax friendliness, regulatory gates, and live legislation.
~50 commercial variables per county: vacancy, rent burden, MSA indicators, HUD income limits, BLS sector employment, FBI crime detail, RPP, and a 0–100 composite score.
District-level search, filters, and county rollups. Enrollment, demographics, and funding tied back to the commercial and site-selection layers.
Official NSO APIs wherever possible, bulk download and PDF extraction where needed, and secondary sources where primary data is restricted.
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 283 live countries (with 283 configured and ingesting), built to join to Overture via stable GERS (Global Entity Reference System) identifiers — the persistent ULIDs Overture assigns to every division. US counties are GERS-crosswalked today; the join key is designed to extend to every admin unit as GERS coverage grows.
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 283-country ingestion pipeline in-house takes years of engineering across API, bulk, scrape, and PDF extraction paths. We've built the hard part. Plug us in.
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.
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, ethnic groups (D-PLACE / EPR), refugee/IDP flows, and cultural values (WVS / regional barometers). A category Overture simply doesn't carry.
-- 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_broadband, t.pct_rent_burdened, t.avg_commute_minutes 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: 3,151 of 3,311 USA admin rows (national + state + county) carry real Overture GERS IDs (95.2%) -- Remaining 160 are categorized placeholders (AK reorganizations, VA BEA pseudo-FIPS, name-match gaps) — see /docs/overture -- Crosswalk pegged to Overture release 2026-03-18.0; 3,151 real GERS IDs across 1 countries and growing
Two honest numbers: 95.2% of all the admin units HERA holds carry a stable Overture GERS ID today; and where Overture models a division at our granularity, HERA matches 95.2% of them. The gap is where Overture models no division at that depth (e.g. Brazil's municipalities) — we hold the authoritative, commercial-safe boundaries for those and are contributing them back to the GERS registry. Read the crosswalk methodology →
Every admin unit HERA holds is matched against Overture — where Overture models the division, it carries a stable GERS join key: a persistent ULID that doesn't drift across releases.
Per-field source, license, and provenance in the DatasetFieldInventory. Licensed for commercial redistribution — sits cleanly alongside Overture Divisions (CDLA-Permissive) in your pipeline.
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.
Open the world map or jump straight into Site Selection. Everything runs locally against the catalog DB.