Research Data Services

Download GIS friendly health behavior and outcomes for Boston. Data is at census tract level so areas can be identified by neighborhood.

Data for the city of Boston which can be subsetted and downloaded.

Provides miscellaneous geospatial data files in both U.S. and worldwide with CC license.

The geospatial section of Analyze Boston. You can access any of the datasets here in a variety of forms: spreadsheets, shapefiles, kmls, and APIs (GeoJSON and GeoService).

Explore and visualize census data, downloadable data format in CSV, Excel or a variety of geographic data formats.

Massachusetts Dept. of Transportation GIS layers.

Provide miscellaneous shapefile layers of census/demographic data, coastal and marine features, conservation/recreation, cultural resources, environmental monitoring and etc.

The National Historical Geographic Information System (NHGIS) provides easy access to summary tables and time series of population, housing, agriculture, and economic data, along with GIS-compatible boundary files, for years from 1790 through the present and for all levels of U.S. census geography, including states, counties, tracts, and blocks.

A GIS data guide maintained by Cornell University library.

Provides miscellaneous geospatial data files in both U.S. and worldwide with CC license.

The current version is 3.6 (released on 6 May 2018). It delimits 386,735 administrative areas. You can download the spatial data by country. Downloading by country is the recommended approach. You can also download the data for the entire world.

The Humanitarian Data Exchange (HDX) is an open platform for sharing data across crises and organisations. Launched in July 2014, the goal of HDX is to make humanitarian data easy to find and use for analysis.

Search your topic and "public access" as keywords to retrieve freely downloadable data in GIS format. Some data is restricted and requires login.

Geospatial data covering various topics that has explicit geographic positioning information included within it in either vector or raster format.