HNDS-I: Critical Data Building Blocks for Socioeconomic Research - Administrative Boundaries

County, state and national borders play vital roles in society. Among other things, they define geographic limits for laws and taxation authority, drive how resources are allocated for public services, and frequently serve as units of observation for research in academic, industrial, international development, humanitarian and defense contexts. To date, approximately 1 million administrative boundaries have been created by governments around the world. Because these boundaries change over time, sometimes very quickly, it is hard to keep track of them. The geoBoundaries project is a data platform that contains information about these boundaries along with software to analyze the data. The geoBoundaries project provides free, transparent, and openly licensed geographic information on geopolitical boundaries. This NSF award supports the continued development of the project. Innovations include automating data processing, including geographic referencing of printed maps extracted from library archives, constructing new data standards with quality control and assurance, and developing new ways to compare geographic information across different datasets. Changes to the data and analytic tools are stored in a public, version controlled system. Country and global information can be downloaded in a variety of formats. The geoBoundaries project makes research possible across a range of social, behavioral, and economic sciences. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.