 | This article includes a list of references, related reading, or external links, but its sources remain unclear because it lacks inline citations .(June 2024) |
The Global Administrative Unit Layers (GAUL) is a spatial database of the administrative units for all the countries in the world. It is a project of the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations.
The GAUL aims at compiling and disseminating the most reliable geographic information on administrative units for all the countries in the world, thereby contributing to the standardization of the spatial dataset representing administrative units. In this framework, its purposes are:
The GAUL always maintains global geographic layers (in shapefile format) with a unified coding system at the levels of country, first administrative (e.g. regions), and second administrative (e.g. districts). In addition, when data is available, it provides layers on a country-by-country basis down to third, fourth and lower levels. The target beneficiary of the GAUL data is the UN community, universities, and other authorized international and national institutions/agencies. Data might not be officially validated by authoritative national sources and can not be distributed to the general public. A disclaimer should always accompany any use of the GAUL data.
Because the GAUL works at global level, controversial boundaries can not be ignored. The approach of the GAUL is to maintain disputed areas in such a way to preserve national integrity for all disputing countries.
The coastline of the GAUL is mostly compliant with the coast of the International Boundary map delivered by the UN Cartographic Section except for some countries (e.g. Vietnam, India, Bangladesh, etc.) where it has been updated according to the satellite images (e.g. Landsat ETM). For future releases of the GAUL, the process of updating the coastline will go on, country by country, through a comparison with the satellite images.
The GAUL keeps track of administrative units that have been changed, added, or deleted in the past. Changes implemented in different years are recorded in the GAUL on different layers. For this reason the GAUL product is not a single layer but a group of layers, named the GAUL Set. The GAUL project does not implement changes dated before 1990.
GAUL codes are numeric and unique for all administrative units at any of the administrative hierarchical level. Any GAUL code is independent from the codes of its higher administrative levels. GAUL codes assigned to administrative units of a given country are not necessarily sequential numbers. The main benefit of the GAUL Coding System is that changing in the codes of an administrative unit might not imply a change of codes of the correspondent units at lower levels. This means that the effort to maintain the links between thematic data and associated administrative units is reduced to a minimum.
The implementation of the GAUL initiative is based on a collaborative work among international agencies and national authorities generating and collecting spatial information on administrative units. The role of FAO is to keep this network of collaborators active, to evaluate and compile data from available sources, to establish procedures for data integration, to generate the GAUL codes and periodically to disseminate the GAUL Set. The overall methodology consists in:
The GAUL has a consistent framework for the delivery of the data. Once a year, an updated version of the GAUL set is released through Geonetwork Archived 2008-12-01 at the Wayback Machine . A new version includes all updates made in the course of the previous year. The dataset is free of charge and it can be downloaded by login (to receive an account, just send an email to the contacts listed at the bottom of this article). The new version GAUL 2009 will be available on Geonetwork from January 2009.
A geographic information system (GIS) consists of integrated computer hardware and software that store, manage, analyze, edit, output, and visualize geographic data. Much of this often happens within a spatial database, however, this is not essential to meet the definition of a GIS. In a broader sense, one may consider such a system also to include human users and support staff, procedures and workflows, the body of knowledge of relevant concepts and methods, and institutional organizations.
Administrative divisions are geographical areas into which a particular independent sovereign state is divided. Such a unit usually has an administrative authority with the power to take administrative or policy decisions for its area.
A geocode is a code that represents a geographic entity. It is a unique identifier of the entity, to distinguish it from others in a finite set of geographic entities. In general the geocode is a human-readable and short identifier.
A choropleth map is a type of statistical thematic map that uses pseudocolor, meaning color corresponding with an aggregate summary of a geographic characteristic within spatial enumeration units, such as population density or per-capita income.
Address geocoding, or simply geocoding, is the process of taking a text-based description of a location, such as an address or the name of a place, and returning geographic coordinates, frequently latitude/longitude pair, to identify a location on the Earth's surface. Reverse geocoding, on the other hand, converts geographic coordinates to a description of a location, usually the name of a place or an addressable location. Geocoding relies on a computer representation of address points, the street / road network, together with postal and administrative boundaries.
Spatial analysis is any of the formal techniques which studies entities using their topological, geometric, or geographic properties. Spatial analysis includes a variety of techniques using different analytic approaches, especially spatial statistics. It may be applied in fields as diverse as astronomy, with its studies of the placement of galaxies in the cosmos, or to chip fabrication engineering, with its use of "place and route" algorithms to build complex wiring structures. In a more restricted sense, spatial analysis is geospatial analysis, the technique applied to structures at the human scale, most notably in the analysis of geographic data. It may also be applied to genomics, as in transcriptomics data.
The Vector Map (VMAP), also called Vector Smart Map, is a vector-based collection of geographic information system (GIS) data about Earth at various levels of detail. Level 0 (low resolution) coverage is global and entirely in the public domain. Level 1 (global coverage at medium resolution) is only partly in the public domain.
The Food and Agriculture Organization Corporate Statistical Database (FAOSTAT) website disseminates statistical data collected and maintained by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). FAOSTAT data are provided as a time-series from 1961 in most domains for 245 countries in English, Spanish and French.
C-squares is a system of spatially unique, location-based identifiers (geocodes) for areas on the surface of the earth, represented as cells from a latitude- and longitude-based Discrete Global Grid at a hierarchical set of resolution steps, obtained by progressively subdividing 10×10 degree World Meteorological Organization squares; the term "c-square" is also available for use to designate any component cell of the grid. Individual cell identifiers incorporate literal values of latitude and longitude in an interleaved notation, together with additional digits that support intermediate grid resolutions of 5, 0.5, 0.05 degrees, etc.
Geospatial metadata is a type of metadata applicable to geographic data and information. Such objects may be stored in a geographic information system (GIS) or may simply be documents, data-sets, images or other objects, services, or related items that exist in some other native environment but whose features may be appropriate to describe in a (geographic) metadata catalog.
The GeoNetwork opensource (GNOS) project is a free and open source (FOSS) cataloging application for spatially referenced resources. It is a catalog of location-oriented information.
A Spatial Data Infrastructure (SDI), also called geospatial data infrastructure, is a data infrastructure implementing a framework of geographic data, metadata, users and tools that are interactively connected in order to use spatial data in an efficient and flexible way. Another definition is "the technology, policies, standards, human resources, and related activities necessary to acquire, process, distribute, use, maintain, and preserve spatial data". Most commonly, institutions with large repositories of geographic data create SDIs to facilitate the sharing of their data with a broader audience.
The Uppsala Conflict Data Program (UCDP) is a data collection program on organized violence, based at Uppsala University in Sweden. The UCDP is a leading provider of data on organized violence and armed conflict, and it is the oldest ongoing data collection project for civil war, with a history of almost 40 years. UCDP data are systematically collected and have global coverage, comparability across cases and countries, and long time series. Data are updated annually and are publicly available, free of charge. Furthermore, preliminary data on events of organized violence in Africa is released on a monthly basis.
The FAO geopolitical ontology is an ontology developed by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) to describe, manage and exchange data related to geopolitical entities such as countries, territories, regions and other similar areas.
The FAO Country Profiles is a multilingual web portal that repackages the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) information archive on its global activities in agriculture and food security in a single area and catalogues it exclusively by country and thematic areas.
A human resource for health information system (HRHIS), also known as human resource information system (HRIS) — is a system for collecting, processing, managing and disseminating data and information on human resource for health (HRH). Depending on the level of development of a country's health care system and the organization of its workforce, an HRHIS can be computerized or paper-based, including information on numbers and distribution of health workers and track their career information. It is usually an integral part of a comprehensive health management information system, and may be used to monitor and assess the performance of the overall health system.
Geospatial topology is the study and application of qualitative spatial relationships between geographic features, or between representations of such features in geographic information, such as in geographic information systems (GIS). For example, the fact that two regions overlap or that one contains the other are examples of topological relationships. It is thus the application of the mathematics of topology to GIS, and is distinct from, but complementary to the many aspects of geographic information that are based on quantitative spatial measurements through coordinate geometry. Topology appears in many aspects of geographic information science and GIS practice, including the discovery of inherent relationships through spatial query, vector overlay and map algebra; the enforcement of expected relationships as validation rules stored in geospatial data; and the use of stored topological relationships in applications such as network analysis. Spatial topology is the generalization of geospatial topology for non-geographic domains, e.g., CAD software.
Food composition data (FCD) are detailed sets of information on the nutritionally important components of foods and provide values for energy and nutrients including protein, carbohydrates, fat, vitamins and minerals and for other important food components such as fibre. The data are presented in food composition databases (FCDBs).
GeoSUR is a regional initiative led by spatial data producers in Latin America and the Caribbean to implement a regional geospatial network and to help establish the basis of a spatial data infrastructure in the region. GeoSUR supports the development of free access geographic services useful to find, view and analyze spatial information through maps, satellite images, and geographic data.
Common Operational Datasets or CODs, are authoritative reference datasets needed to support operations and decision-making for all actors in a humanitarian response. CODs are 'best available' datasets that ensure consistency and simplify the discovery and exchange of key data. The data is typically geo-spatially linked using a coordinate system and has unique geographic identification codes (P-codes).