International Boundaries Polygons Level 1 - GAUL

The Global Administrative Unit Layers (GAUL) is an initiative implemented by FAO within the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Agricultural Market Information System (AMIS) and AfricaFertilizer.org projects.

The GAUL compiles and disseminates the best available information on administrative units for all the countries in the world, providing a contribution to the standardization of the spatial dataset representing administrative units. The GAUL always maintains global layers with a unified coding system at country, first (e.g. departments) and second administrative levels (e.g. districts). Where data is available, it provides layers on a country by country basis down to third, fourth and lowers levels. The overall methodology consists in a) collecting the best available data from most reliable sources, b) establishing validation periods of the geographic features (when possible), c) adding selected data to the global layer based on the last country boundaries map provided by the UN Cartographic Unit (UNCS), d) generating codes using GAUL Coding System and e) distribute data to the users (see TechnicalaspectsGAUL2015.pdf).

Because GAUL works at global level, unsettled territories are reported. The approach of GAUL is to deal with these areas in such a way to preserve national integrity for all disputing countries (see TechnicalaspectsGAUL2015.pdf and G2015_DisputedAreas.dbf).

GAUL is released once a year and the target beneficiary of GAUL data is the UN community and other authorized international and national partners. Data might not be officially validated by authoritative national sources and cannot be distributed to the general public. A disclaimer should always accompany any use of GAUL data.

5 territories have been updated respect to the previous release. Moreover, the coastline of American countries or other special areas have been updated using Open Street Map (see ReleaseNoteGAUL2015.pdf).

GAUL keeps track of administrative units that has been changed, added or dismissed in the past for political causes. Changes implemented in different years are recorded in GAUL on different layers. For this reason the GAUL product is not a single layer but a group of layers, named "GAUL Set" (see ReleaseNoteGAUL2015.pdf).

GAUL 2015 is the eighth release of the GAUL Set.

Simple

Date ( Revision )
2014-12-19T16:45:00
Edition
2015
Identifier
http://datacore.grid.unep.ch/geonetwork/srv/metadata/e82c2b11-7c24-418b-baae-e5984a0b61bb
Presentation form
Digital map
Purpose
The Global Administrative Unit Layers (GAUL) aims at compiling and disseminating the most reliable spatial information on administrative units for all countries in the world.
Status
Completed
Point of contact
FAO Statistics Division (ESS) - Fabio Grita ( Information Technology - Systems Support Officer )
Via delle Terme di Caracalla Rome 00151 Italy

Maintenance and update frequency
Biannually
Keywords ( Theme )
  • GRID core datasets
  • administrative
  • global
  • subnational
Keywords ( Place )
  • World
Access constraints
License
Use constraints
License
Other constraints
The GAUL dataset is distributed to the United Nations and other authorized international and national institutions/agencies. FAO grants a license to use, download and print the materials contained in the GAUL dataset solely for non-commercial purposes and in accordance with the conditions specified in the data license. The full GAUL Data License document is available for downloading.
Spatial representation type
Vector
Metadata language
eng
Character set
UTF8
Topic category
  • Boundaries
Begin date
2014
End date
2014
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Supplemental Information
The GAUL license is also subject to the constraints and limitations of the data license of the International Boundary Dataset of the UN Cartographic Section and the one of the Second Administrative Level Boundary (SALB) data (for the countries that use this dataset).
Reference system identifier
WGS 1984
OnLine resource
DataLicenseGAUL2015.pdf ( WWW:LINK-1.0-http--link )

GAUL Data License

OnLine resource
Data download (shape ZIP) ( WWW:LINK-1.0-http--link )

Data download (shape ZIP)

Hierarchy level
Dataset

Metadata

File identifier
e82c2b11-7c24-418b-baae-e5984a0b61bb XML
Metadata language
eng
Character set
UTF8
Date stamp
2017-05-02T08:30:53
Metadata standard name
ISO 19115:2003/19139
Metadata standard version
1.0
Point of contact
FAO Statistics Division (ESS) - Fabio Grita ( Information Technology - Systems Support Officer )
Via delle Terme di Caracalla Rome 00151 Rome Italy

 
 

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Keywords

GRID core datasets administrative global subnational

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