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. 2020 Apr 24;15(4):e0231866.
doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0231866. eCollection 2020.

geoBoundaries: A global database of political administrative boundaries

Daniel Runfola  1   2 , Austin Anderson  2 , Heather Baier  2 , Matt Crittenden  2 , Elizabeth Dowker  2 , Sydney Fuhrig  2 , Seth Goodman  1   2 , Grace Grimsley  2 , Rachel Layko  2 , Graham Melville  2 , Maddy Mulder  2 , Rachel Oberman  3 , Joshua Panganiban  2 , Andrew Peck  2 , Leigh Seitz  4 , Sylvia Shea  2 , Hannah Slevin  2 , Rebecca Youngerman  5 , Lauren Hobbs  6
Affiliations

geoBoundaries: A global database of political administrative boundaries

Daniel Runfola et al. PLoS One. .

Abstract

We present the geoBoundaries Global Administrative Database (geoBoundaries): an online, open license resource of the geographic boundaries of political administrative divisions (i.e., state, county). Contrasted to other resources geoBoundaries (1) provides detailed information on the legal open license for every boundary in the repository, and (2) focuses on provisioning highly precise boundary data to support accurate, replicable scientific inquiry. Further, all data is released in a structured form, allowing for the integration of geoBoundaries with large-scale computational workflows. Our database has records for every country around the world, with up to 5 levels of administrative hierarchy. The database is accessible at http://www.geoboundaries.org, and a static version is archived on the Harvard Dataverse.

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Conflict of interest statement

R.O., L.S. and L.H. are employees of the commercial entities Intel Corporation, Booz Allen Hamilton, and Deloitte, respectively. This does not alter our adherence to PLOS ONE policies on sharing data and materials.

Figures

Fig 1
Fig 1. Current state of the geoBoundaries database.
All countries are shaded to indicate the depth of hierarchy of the administrative zones collected. Higher numbers indicate deeper hierarchies are available.
Fig 2
Fig 2. Example file structure of the geoBoundaries data product.
This structure can be used to construct a download URL for any file in the database—for example, https://geoboundaries.org/data/geoBoundaries-2_0_0/JPN/ADM0/geoBoundaries-2_0_0-JPN-ADM0-shp.zip can be used to download the shapefile for the specified country and ADM level.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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Grants and funding

This work was performed in part using computing facilities at the College of William and Mary which were provided by contributions from the National Science Foundation, the Commonwealth of Virginia Equipment Trust Fund and the Office of Naval Research. D.R. received two awards which supported this research. Award one was from the Cloudera Foundation, www.clouderafoundation.org. Award two was from the Jeffress Memorial Trust, which has no online presence. The Intel Corporation, Booz Allen Hamilton, and Deloitte provide support in the form of salaries to authors R.O., L.S., and L.H., but did not have any role in the study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. The specific roles of these authors are articulated in the ‘author contributions’ section. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.