# Compass place data

Reviewed on **16 September 2026**. The first Compass catalogue contains **85 countries and their selected capitals**, with names in English, Arabic, French, Spanish, German, and Russian. It contains no other city categories, flags, currencies, or external search results. This is a curated game catalogue rather than a list of every country or capital.

## Coordinates and gameplay

Every latitude and longitude is copied exactly from the local **15 September 2026 GeoNames cities15000 snapshot** already used by Pullback's Map catalogue. `geonameId` records the matched locality. The complete source-file SHA-256 is retained in `compass-data.js`.

- [GeoNames download](https://download.geonames.org/export/dump/cities15000.zip)
- [GeoNames data format](https://download.geonames.org/export/dump/readme.txt)
- [Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

Coordinates are approximate locality reference points, not surveyed city centres or national borders. Both country and capital rounds use these same capital reference points; country rounds must say so in the interface. Direction means the initial great-circle bearing from the starting point. It does not mean the direction to the nearest national border, or the angle of a line drawn on a flat world map.

Capital names were matched within the country code against the maintained Clues catalogue's names and aliases. Ambiguous locality aliases were resolved by choosing GeoNames's `PPLC` record: Abuja, Tehran, New Delhi, Washington DC, San José, and Brasília each have other locality matches. Two explicit locality IDs support capitals whose GeoNames feature code is not `PPLC`: Sri Jayawardenepura Kotte (`1238992`) and East Jerusalem (`7303419`). Coordinates were not inferred or invented.

## Names, capital conventions, and licence

Display names reuse Pullback's maintained [Clues catalogue](./clues-catalogue-notes.md), derived from [mledoze/countries](https://github.com/mledoze/countries/tree/c8015eebdd94c533358406b0d709f441389e1f2e) and Unicode CLDR names. The resulting database is available under the [Open Database Licence 1.0](https://opendatacommons.org/licenses/odbl/1-0/). The complete derived database is the adjacent [compass-data.js](./compass-data.js). GeoNames coordinate attribution remains applicable. The game implementation is separate from the database.

- **Palestine:** concise country names are Palestine / فلسطين / Palestine / Palestina / Palästina / Палестина. East Jerusalem is retained with `capitalRole: "claimed"`, following the [Palestinian Ministry of Foreign Affairs' stated position](https://www.mofa.pna.ps/en-us/mn/our-position). Its exact GeoNames reference is `31.78336, 35.23388`, record `7303419`, country code `PS`. Ramallah is not substituted as the capital. The owner's excluded country, its capitals, and its aliases are absent from this catalogue.
- **Switzerland:** Bern is the federal city and de facto capital; `capitalRole: "federal"` preserves this distinction. See the [Swiss Federal Department of Foreign Affairs](https://www.aboutswitzerland.eda.admin.ch/en/political-system).
- **South Africa:** Pretoria is the selected administrative capital, marked `capitalRole: "administrative"`. This is one capital reference for game directions, not a claim that the country has only one capital.
- **Sri Lanka:** Sri Jayawardenepura Kotte is retained as the legislative capital, marked `capitalRole: "legislative"`; see the existing Clues catalogue's municipal-council source.
- **Bolivia:** Sucre is the selected capital reference; La Paz is not silently substituted.
- **Indonesia:** this September 2026 snapshot retains Jakarta. The Nusantara authority's [July 2026 update](https://ikn.go.id/id/posts/pembangunan-tahap-ii-ikn-terus-berjalan-otorita-ikn-lakukan-evaluasi-berkala) continues to describe a 2028 political-capital target. Review Indonesia explicitly if its capital designation changes; do not replace coordinates in already assigned daily rounds.

## Stable content and integration

Browser global: `CompassData`. CommonJS: `require('./compass-data.js')`. Data is deeply frozen after loading. Each record has a stable two-letter `code`, six-language `country` and `capital` names, `lat`, `lng`, and `geonameId`; selected entries also retain `capitalRole`.

The catalogue epoch is `2026-09-16`, version `1`. Daily route selection depends on stable data, so future catalogue changes must preserve the existing daily sequence or explicitly introduce a versioned schedule. Names can be corrected without changing country codes or coordinate identities. Never import an unfiltered external country list into the game.