Daniel Miller Runfola
William & Mary, VA·Social Science
County, state and national borders decide where laws apply, who collects taxes and how public resources are shared. Researchers also use them as basic units for analysis in fields from economics to humanitarian work.
- Fields
Social Science
Computer Science
Earth & Environmental Science
- Topics
administrative boundaries
geoBoundaries
geospatial data
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Aug 2028
What they work on
- Automate processing of administrative boundary data for the geoBoundaries platform, including georeferencing printed maps from library archives so historical borders can be placed on modern coordinates.
- Create new data standards with quality control and assurance for roughly 1 million administrative boundaries that change over time.
- Develop methods to compare geographic information across different boundary datasets, with changes stored in a public version-controlled system.
More about the research
Governments worldwide have drawn about 1 million administrative boundaries, and these change over time, sometimes quickly. That makes it hard to keep accurate, comparable records.
Why it matters
Accurate, open boundary data supports research in the social, behavioral and economic sciences. It could also aid work in international development, humanitarian response and public-service planning, where resources are often allocated by administrative unit. Researchers and practitioners worldwide would benefit.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Mohamed Mokbel
University of Minnesota, MN·Computer Science
Infer missing road and traffic-related map information, beyond basic road layout, by combining vehicle trajectory data with open-source maps to build more complete and accurate maps.
Casey Barrier
Bryn Mawr College, PA·Social Science
Conduct a high-resolution magnetometry survey of more than 5.5 square kilometers of a precolonial Indigenous city to map buried features across nearly the entire site.
Ming Xiao
Pennsylvania State University, PA·Engineering
Establish ground- and drone-based monitoring of permafrost change on Alaska's North Slope, and combine it with satellite remote sensing and image processing to track erosion and subsidence.
The school
William & Mary: 11 labs on PI Pages, $95M a year on research, 67 research doctorates a year.
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