Great Britain Country Boundaries at Multiple Resolutions, December 2016

Great Britain's digital vector boundaries for countries, as of December 2016. The dataset contains five boundary versions, including full-resolution extent and coastline-clipped versions at 20m, 200m, and 500m generalisation levels. It is provided by the Office for National Statistics and contains Ordnance Survey and ONS Intellectual Property Rights.

Use Cases

• Create detailed national maps based on full-resolution boundaries extending to the Mean Low Water mark.
• Generate simplified visualizations for web mapping using the ultra generalised (500m) coastline-clipped boundaries.
• Perform spatial analysis on country-level administrative units in Great Britain based on the vector boundaries.
• Integrate administrative boundaries into GIS software for planning or demographic studies based on the provided feature services.

Strengths

• Offers five distinct boundary versions, from full resolution (24-29 MB) to ultra generalised (150 KB), catering to different use cases.
• Explicitly documents the boundary definitions, such as 'Mean Low Water mark' for extent and 'Mean High Water mark' for clipped versions.
• Provides direct access via multiple ArcGIS REST services for programmatic use and download.

Limitations

• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• Data is a snapshot from December 2016; administrative boundaries may have changed since then.
• Row count is unknown, which may limit suitability assessment for large-scale statistical analysis.

Provenance

Source

Office for National Statistics (UK), Ordnance Survey

Collection Method

Likely digitized from official cartographic sources.

Time Range

December 2016

Freshness

Last updated 2026-07-08 13:33:24.659385; freshness should be verified as the data itself represents December 2016.

Geography

Great Britain (England, Scotland, Wales)