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

县、州和国界在社会中起着至关重要的作用。除其他外，它们定义了法律和税务当局的地理限制，推动公共服务资源的分配，并经常作为学术、工业、国际发展、人道主义和国防背景下的研究的观察单位。到目前为止，世界各国政府已经建立了大约100万条行政边界。由于这些界限会随着时间的推移而变化，有时变化得非常快，因此很难跟踪它们。地理边界项目是一个数据平台，其中包含有关这些边界的信息以及用于分析数据的软件。地理边界项目提供关于地缘政治边界的免费、透明和开放许可的地理信息。这一NSF奖项支持该项目的持续发展。创新包括自动化数据处理，包括对从图书馆档案中提取的印刷地图进行地理参考，构建具有质量控制和保证的新数据标准，以及开发新的方法来比较不同数据集的地理信息。对数据和分析工具的更改存储在一个受版本控制的公共系统中。可以下载各种格式的国家和全球信息。地理边界项目使一系列社会、行为和经济科学的研究成为可能。这一奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

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.