Geographical Infrastructure v. 2015

The Boston Area Research Initiative’s Geographical Infrastructure for Boston is a multipart database that compiles and connects the places and regions of Boston, MA as organized at 16 levels, each comprised of a data set containing the universe of all locations at that level. The levels are organized in a hierarchy, with the items in each level nested in the higher-level regions that contain it (e.g., addresses in census geographies). This is coordinated via variables that act as unique identifiers at each level. As a composite, the database is intended to facilitate aggregate calculations and to make analyses of data from different sources with geographic reference interoperable. In particular, the database makes it possible to connect data sets generated by the City of Boston with census geographies and data.