The Global Impact Study

The Global Impact Study will create an inventory and taxonomy that will be useful for both our research and other efforts aimed at understanding the public access space. The inventory will be stored in a database and can be thought of as a directory to help support top-level documentation of facilities. In addition to serving as a useful tool in its own right, the inventory will help to facilitate rich analysis by making it possible to differentiate venues by type of establishment. The inventory will additionally serve as a frame from which to draw survey samples.

An important aspect of the inventory is a taxonomy to allow understanding of facility type without having to assign a nomenclature that may vary in definition across countries. A main intent of the taxonomy is that it will provide data from which facilities can be mapped and selected for in-depth research. Inputs that go into the taxonomy will

• Be able to be obtained solely from existing administrative data for all facilities with high confidence
• Provide a high-level description of the venue
• Be extensible when we add new countries (ideally, a model for any country in the world — this portion is referred to as the global taxonomy)

To capture details not included in the global taxonomy that country researchers feel are essential for high-level understanding of facilities within their country contexts, researchers can additionally create a country-specific taxonomy. These data will be centrally stored with other high-level administrative data.

Country Research Teams and the Research Working Group are currently reviewing and commenting on a model inventory and taxonomy .

• View the model inventory
• See the model global taxonomy