Publications

This paper makes a proposal for a taxonomy of boundary changes in Spanish municipalities along time. The different types of changes are organized in a hierarchy, as well as represented in a homogeneous manner, independently of the number of municipalities involved and of the changes suffered. Each alteration is described in a precise and unambiguous way, and it is codified to permit an automatic treatment of the information. In addition to an efficient treatment of the information about municipal changes, a normalized representation facilitates the automatic detection of inconsistencies in public databases. At the same time, the taxonomy allow us to define backward and forward equivalence rules, that helps in the task of generating homogeneous time series about municipal characteristics, like population or surface. Eventually, we offer an application of the proposal to inconsistencies and error detection in the database: Municipal Changes in Population Census from 1842 from the Spanish National Statistical Institute (INE).