Which provinces make up the regions of Myanmar, Burundi, Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico and Palau?

Question

Hi,

I'm building a small personal database of my geocaching data. I want region and county assignments that match Project-GC exactly, so that my numbers agree with your challenge checkers.

For almost every country I could reproduce your regions and counties from OpenStreetMap. For five countries, though, your regions don't seem to correspond to any administrative boundaries I can find in OSM (current or 2021) or in Natural Earth, and geocaching.com doesn't provide a state for caches there either:

• Myanmar: Central, East, Lower, North, South, West
• Burundi: Eastern, Northern, Southern, Western
• Dominican Republic: Cibao, Este, Sur
• Puerto Rico: Central, East, Metro, North, South, West
• Palau: Babeldaob, North, Southwest, Southwest Islands

Could you tell me how these regions are defined? Ideally either which provinces/municipalities (or OSM relations) belong to each region, or the source you use for these polygons.

As a cross-check, I'd also like to confirm two countries where I assumed the official grouping:

• Thailand: the six regions follow the official six-region scheme (e.g. Chon Buri in Eastern, Phetchaburi in Western).
• Malaysia: Malaysia Timur = Sabah, Sarawak and Labuan; Semenanjung Malaysia = all other states.

Thanks a lot for Project-GC and for any pointers!

Best regards,

Steven

Answer 1

All these countries use OSM boundaries as their source. Some of them use regions that are researched from official sources, but they are still built on combining different OSM boundaries. Pretty sure that the only country in the entire world that's not using OSM as the source is Canada.

Easiest way to duplicate them is probably to work with https://osm-boundaries.com/map and compare against the Map Regions. But you should know that this data can be updated at any time so having them match is not a "once and done" kind of project.