Mapbox Boundaries adds US Census boundaries and more
By: Jeff Butler
We just pushed a huge update to Mapbox Boundaries that includes over two million new boundaries, increasing our data coverage in over 100 countries. In this release, you will find highlights such as:
- Statistical — Over 275,000 new US Census boundaries including metropolitan areas, micropolitan areas, tracts, & block groups
- Statistical — Almost 2,000 new European NUTS (Nomenclature of Territorial Units for Statistics) areas across three hierarchical levels
- Postal — Full detail Postal-4 coverage for countries such as the UK, Netherlands, South Korea, and Japan.
- Administrative — Wikidata IDs, translations and aliases added for admin-1 & admin-2 boundaries
Additionally, this update improves recency for the Americas, Europe, Africa and Asia that includes China, Japan, India, mainland southeast Asia, resulting in a highly detailed, global set of edge-matched polygons at all zoom levels that is validated by Mapbox cartographers and geospatial engineers.
Building with Boundaries
The quality of every boundary has enabled Mapbox Boundaries to be used in incredible analyses and tools across industries and the mapping community since its release. Some examples are:
- Advanced business intelligence solutions within platforms such as Tableau and MicroStrategy
- Logistics tracking with geofencing for smart notifications
- Data visualizations depicting everything from refugee migration patterns to trends in entertainment and sporting events.
One viral data visualization powered by Mapbox Boundaries was a map last year of the most popular song in every city created by visual journalists from The Pudding.
“Mapbox Boundaries is one of the most detailed set of geographies I’ve ever encountered. I was able to map millions of coordinates to highly precise regions, allowing for aggregations of data that I didn’t know was possible. Moreover, the detail of the boundaries is astounding, allowing for sub-country choropleths (i.e., heatmaps) on a global level.”
— Matt Daniels, CEO, The Pudding
What can you do with Mapbox Boundaries?
Today’s updates, paired with the core foundational product capabilities of Mapbox Boundaries — like localized world views and a vector tile-based rendering scheme — allow this release to support even deeper geospatial insights and data-driven problem solving across industries and government use cases.
Over the course of the new few weeks, we’ll highlight more examples of building with Boundaries. Let us know what you’re building by tagging your visualizations and interactive maps on twitter with #builtwithmapbox and we’ll share from @mapbox.
For more, check out the product page to see how Mapbox Boundaries can help with your use case. Mapbox Boundaries is available through annual commitment plans as well as in data visualization platforms like Tableau and MicroStrategy. If you’re ready to get started with Boundaries, reach out to our team.
Jeff Butler - Senior Product Manager - Data Products - Mapbox | LinkedIn
Two million new boundaries to understand your data was originally published in Points of interest on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.