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GDELT-SA · Tabaqat · Source Cooperative | Source Cooperative

GDELT Saudi Arabia Daily News Events

Enriched GDELT 2.0 event records related to Saudi Arabia, updated daily. Each record is deduplicated, geo-enriched with nearest-city matching, and includes scraped article full text when available.

Demo: geonews.tabaqat.dev - Interactive map to explore the data.

Bucket Structure

One Parquet file per day (ZSTD compressed). New files are synced daily around midnight UTC via GitHub Actions.

What's in Each File

Every row is a single GDELT event. Columns fall into four groups:

Group	Examples	Count
Event	`GLOBALEVENTID`, `SQLDATE`, `EventCode`, `QuadClass`, `GoldsteinScale`, `AvgTone`, `NumMentions`	34
Actor geography	`Actor1Geo_FullName`, `Actor1Geo_Lat/Long`, `Actor2Geo_*`	16
Action geography	`ActionGeo_FullName`, `ActionGeo_CountryCode`, `ActionGeo_Lat/Long`	8
Geo enrichment	`NearestCity`, `CityPopulation`, `DistanceToCity_km`, `CoordQuality` (×3 geo sets)	12
Article	`ArticleTitle`, `ArticleContent`, `ArticleAuthor`, `ArticlePublishDate`, `ArticleContentLength`, `ArticleScrapeMethod`	6

~76 columns total. Full schema details in the source repo.

Processing Pipeline

Raw GDELT 15-minute dumps go through:

Filter — keep only events involving Saudi Arabia
Clean — remove nulls, empty URLs, invalid tone values
Deduplicate — one best record per source URL (scored by data completeness)
Geo-enrich — match coordinates to nearest city using a 33K+ world cities reference via Haversine distance
Scrape — extract article text using Trafilatura → Newspaper4k → Playwright fallback chain (up to 500/day)

Quick Query (DuckDB)

License & Attribution

Data derived from the GDELT Project. Refer to GDELT's terms of use for redistribution rights. Pipeline source code is MIT licensed.

1s3://us-west-2.opendata.source.coop/tabaqat/gdelt-sa/
2└── country=SA/
3    └── year=YYYY/
4        ├── YYYY_MM_DD.parquet
5        ├── YYYY_MM_DD.parquet
6        └── ...

1s3://us-west-2.opendata.source.coop/tabaqat/gdelt-sa/
2└── country=SA/
3    └── year=YYYY/
4        ├── YYYY_MM_DD.parquet
5        ├── YYYY_MM_DD.parquet
6        └── ...

1-- read a single day
2SELECT * FROM 's3://us-west-2.opendata.source.coop/tabaqat/gdelt-sa/country=SA/year=2026/2026_01_01.parquet' LIMIT 10;
3
4-- count events with articles across all days
5SELECT count(*) AS total,
6       count(ArticleTitle) AS with_articles
7FROM 's3://us-west-2.opendata.source.coop/tabaqat/gdelt-sa/country=SA/**/*.parquet';
8
9-- top mentioned cities
10SELECT NearestCity, count(*) AS n
11FROM 's3://us-west-2.opendata.source.coop/tabaqat/gdelt-sa/country=SA/**/*.parquet'
12WHERE NearestCity IS NOT NULL
13GROUP BY 1 ORDER BY 2 DESC LIMIT 10;

1-- read a single day
2SELECT * FROM 's3://us-west-2.opendata.source.coop/tabaqat/gdelt-sa/country=SA/year=2026/2026_01_01.parquet' LIMIT 10;
3
4-- count events with articles across all days
5SELECT count(*) AS total,
6       count(ArticleTitle) AS with_articles
7FROM 's3://us-west-2.opendata.source.coop/tabaqat/gdelt-sa/country=SA/**/*.parquet';
8
9-- top mentioned cities
10SELECT NearestCity, count(*) AS n
11FROM 's3://us-west-2.opendata.source.coop/tabaqat/gdelt-sa/country=SA/**/*.parquet'
12WHERE NearestCity IS NOT NULL
13GROUP BY 1 ORDER BY 2 DESC LIMIT 10;