Support for Global Administrative Unit Layers (GAUL)

18392
Reporter: rdmpage
Assignee: jlegind
Type: NewFeature
Summary: Support for Global Administrative Unit Layers (GAUL)
Priority: Unassessed
Status: Open
Created: 2016-04-12 06:19:29.409
Updated: 2016-04-12 06:23:43.16
        
Description: This is not so much an urgent request as a note to put this on GBIF's radar if it isn't already.

Working with some global public health datasets (e.g., "The global compendium of Aedes aegypti and Ae. albopictus occurrence" http://doi.org/10.1038/sdata.2015.35, and
https://dx.doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.902845_D1 from "A global compendium of human dengue virus occurrence" http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/sdata.2014.4 ) I've come across Global Administrative Unit Layers (GAUL) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Administrative_Unit_Layers. These are developed by the FAO and provide standardised localities at various levels from country (level 0) down.

Given their use in datasets relating to some high-profile diseases that have vectors in GBIF (e.g., _Aedes aegypti_ and _Ae. albopictus_) it would be useful to think about supporting the win the future.

Some relevant resources:

* Mapping between ISO country codes and GAUL http://www.fao.org/countryprofiles/iso3list/en/
* Metadata for GAUL http://www.fao.org/geonetwork/srv/en/metadata.show?id=12691
* First order GAUL from WorldMap https://worldmap.harvard.edu/data/geonode:g2008_1
* Second order GAUL from GDELT project http://blog.gdeltproject.org/global-second-order-administrative-divisions-now-available-from-gaul/

What I envisage is that GBIF will receive datasets using these codes. In some cases (e.g., the mosquito dataset referred to above) the information is in the form of the GAUL level (e.g., 2) and the centroid of the corresponding polygon, but not an identifier for the actual polygon. Hence it would be nice to have a service that took a (latitude, longitude) pair and returned the corresponding GAUL codes for levels 0, 1, and 2 and the polygon representing that area. We could then represent the occurrence as a WKT rather than a point.]]>
    

Author: rdmpage
Comment: I've also come across "Global Administrative Areas" http://gadm.org. Not sure how this relates to GAUL, but interesting to see that John Wieczorek is involved.
Created: 2016-04-12 06:23:43.16
Updated: 2016-04-12 06:23:43.16