Global Administrative Unit Layers - Organization

Organization

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:

  1. collecting the best available data from most reliable sources
  2. establishing validation periods of the geographic features (when possible)
  3. adding selected data to the global layer based on the international boundaries provided by the UN Cartographic Unit
  4. generating codes using the GAUL Coding System
  5. distributing data to the users

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. 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.


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