Jurisdictional Data

An open ontology of U.S. government — structured as JSON, versioned with Git.

What This Is

Government is made of objects: jurisdictions contain agencies, agencies employ people, people hold positions, agencies provide services. This repository models that structure as a domain-driven ontology of public civic data.

Each JSON file represents a single entity. The directory structure reflects the natural hierarchy of government. Anyone can contribute. Any application can consume it.

Directory Structure

jurisdictions/             # Geographic/political boundaries
  federal/                 #   The United States
  states/                  #   50 states + DC + territories
  counties/                #   ~3,200 counties and equivalents
  places/                  #   Cities, towns, villages, boroughs, CDPs
  school-districts/        #   Administrative school districts
  tribal/                  #   Tribal jurisdictions
agencies/                  # Government departments and organizations
bodies/                    # Governing bodies (councils, boards, commissions)
positions/                 # Roles linking people to agencies and bodies
people/                    # Public officials and government employees
services/                  # Public services provided by agencies
domains/                   # Government web domains (from dotgov registry)
schemas/                   # JSON Schema definitions for each entity type

Jurisdictions are organized by Census geographic level, using Census GEOIDs as the canonical identifiers.

The Ontology

Government entities relate to each other in a clear hierarchy:

Jurisdiction (geographic boundary)
  └── Agency (department, bureau, office)
        ├── Service (permits, licenses, benefits)
        ├── Body (council, board, commission)
        │     └── Position (member seat)
        ├── Position (staff role)
        └── Domain (website)

Person ──holds──▶ Position

Each entity type has a JSON Schema defining its fields and relationships. Cross-references between entities use filenames (without .json extension).

Use Cases

This data is designed to be consumed by any application that needs structured civic data:

• Civic tech platforms
• Government directories
• Open data portals
• Research and analysis
• AI and LLM grounding

Clone the repo, read the JSON, build on it.

Contributing

We welcome contributions from anyone. See CONTRIBUTING.md for the full guide.

The short version:

1. Fork this repository
2. Add or update .json files in the appropriate directory
3. Validate your JSON against the schemas in schemas/
4. Open a pull request with a description of your data source

All contributions must come from public, verifiable sources. Every file includes a _meta object attributing the source.

Data Sources

• Census TIGER/Line — Jurisdiction boundaries and GEOIDs
• Dotgov Registry — U.S. government domain names
• data.gov — Federal open data
• Community contributions

Git LFS

JSON files are tracked with Git LFS. Install it before cloning:

git lfs install
git clone https://github.com/jurisdictional/jurisdictional-data.git

License

The database is open under the Open Database License (ODbL) 1.0, and the contents of each record under the Database Contents License (DbCL) 1.0. Use it for anything, commercial use included, with credit and share-alike. Credit: "Contains information from Jurisdictional (https://jurisdictional.org), made available under the ODbL 1.0." A commercial license waives share-alike and attribution for closed products, and newsrooms, nonprofits and governments can apply for one at no cost: see https://jurisdictional.org/license. Contributions come in under the same terms. U.S. government works are in the public domain, and facts from upstream sources keep their own terms.