An Automated Approach for Clipping Geographic Data before Projection that Maintains Data Integrity and Minimizes Distortion for Virtually Any Projection Method
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Selecting a map projection is key to minimizing distortion and thus clear communication of spatial data and accurate spatial analysis. Methods exist for selecting projections based on the intended area of use but not for finding polygons that can be used to clip geographic data to ensure the data are projected correctly and within desired distortion limits. The projection methods available in the Proj library were examined to determine the nature of the errors and distortions they created based on global data and a wide variety of available settings. Approaches were then identified for each projection including simple bounding boxes and more complex clipping polygons. To make sure that errors were not introduced into the projected data, data integrity polygons (DIPs) were created by placing a grid of cells over the Earth and then finding a cell near the origin that was within the specified criteria. Adjacent cells were added to the DIPs that met the criteria until no additional cells could be added. The criteria included projected cell sides could not intersect with themselves or other cells, the order of the cell corners could not be reversed, and distortion within the cell had to be within specified limits. I found that up to two DIPs with a limit on length distortion of a factor of 4 provided a general solution for all but three projection methods. Limitations included the time to find DIPs at high resolution. Clipping polygons and visualizations of the results were made available on a website.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.009 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".