I'm building a geospatial app and need boundary data plus points of interest. What datasets should I start with?

A good starter stack is usually:

1) Administrative boundaries

Use these for countries, states/provinces, counties, cities, etc.

• OpenStreetMap boundaries
  • Good for local/admin boundaries and lots of detail
  • Access via Geofabrik, BBBike, or custom OSM extracts
• GADM
  • Very popular global administrative boundaries dataset
  • Great for country → subnational levels
• Natural Earth
  • Best for lightweight global boundary data at small scales
  • Useful for country boundaries and simple regional layers
• UN SALB (where available)
  • Authoritative administrative boundaries for some regions
• Open data portals from governments
  • Often the best source for parcel, municipal, county, or district boundaries

2) Points of Interest (POIs)

Use these depending on your app’s needs.

• OpenStreetMap POIs
  • Most flexible starting point
  • Includes shops, amenities, tourism, transport, healthcare, etc.
  • Accessible via planet extracts, Overpass API, or regional extracts
• Foursquare Places / Places APIs
  • Strong POI coverage and category structure
  • Often better for commercial POI search/use cases
• Google Places
  • Very rich POI data, but API/licensing constraints apply
• SafeGraph / Near / other commercial location datasets
  • Good if you need business locations, foot-traffic-oriented datasets, or enriched POIs
• Government/open data POI sources
  • Great for public infrastructure: schools, hospitals, parks, libraries, transit stops

3) Base layers / reference layers

Helpful for map context and enrichment.

• Natural Earth
  • Land, coastlines, lakes, rivers, populated places
• OpenStreetMap-derived tiles or vector layers
  • Roads, water, landuse, labels
• Microsoft Global Building Footprints
  • Great for building outlines in many countries
• Global Human Settlement Layer (GHSL)
  • Useful for urbanization and settlement context

4) If you want global coverage quickly

A practical combo is:

• Boundaries: GADM + Natural Earth
• POIs: OpenStreetMap
• Context: GHSL or Natural Earth

5) If you want commercial-grade search / category consistency

A practical combo is:

• Boundaries: GADM or authoritative government boundaries
• POIs: Google Places or Foursquare
• Context: OSM/Natural Earth

6) Things to watch for

• Licensing: OSM is ODbL; commercial APIs have usage limits
• Update frequency: boundaries and POIs go stale quickly
• Geometry quality: admin boundaries can differ across sources
• Coverage: some regions are much better mapped than others
• Normalization: POI categories differ a lot by source, so you may need a category mapping layer

If you tell me:

1. your target geography,
2. whether this is commercial or internal, and
3. whether you need search, display, or analytics,

I can recommend a specific dataset stack and ingestion pipeline.