Geographical Infrastructure v. 2017

The Boston Area Research Initiative’s Geographical Infrastructure for Boston is a database that organizes and links the places and regions of Boston, MA across 17 levels—including land parcels, streets, census geographies, and other administrative regions. The levels are organized in a hierarchy, with the items in each level nested in the higher-level regions that contain it (e.g., land parcels 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 across levels of the hierarchy and analyses of data from different sources that reference the same geographical units. In particular, the database makes it possible to connect data sets generated by the City of Boston with census geographies and data.