Boundaries

The boundary family supplies the four country geometries used to define Sweden, Norway, Finland, Denmark, and their shared Nordic scope. It governs publication framing, country filtering, and membership tests; it contributes no scientific weight to a feature inside a polygon.

Captured State

The collection summary identifies the boundary family as version v66, retrieved on 2026-06-22 through the collector pipeline under public geodata terms. It records separate SHA-256 digests for the captured and normalized state, plus a dispute token that identifies the exact snapshot used by publication.

The normalized artifact is data/boundaries/normalized/nordic_country_boundaries.geojson. It contains one MultiPolygon feature for each Nordic publication country:

Country	Governed use
Sweden	country selection and Nordic composition
Norway	country selection and Nordic composition
Finland	country selection and Nordic composition
Denmark	country selection and Nordic composition

The normalized geometry is the authority from which scope-specific copies are published. A copy beside a map is convenient for reuse, but it is not an independent boundary source. Its meaning depends on the normalized family, the product registry, and the selection rule that produced the bundle.

Acquisition And Replacement

flowchart LR
    Upstream["boundary source"] --> Staging["staged capture and normalization"]
    Staging --> Validate["geometry and family contract checks"]
    Validate --> Swap["governed data/boundaries state"]
    Validate -->|failure| Preserve["previous governed state remains"]
    Swap --> Registry["publication geography registry"]
    Registry --> Products["Nordic and country products"]

Refresh uses a staging swap. The collector prepares a temporary family tree, validates it, and replaces data/boundaries/ only after success. A failed refresh preserves the preceding governed state. This makes a geometry change reviewable as a collection change rather than an in-place mutation of a published product.

How Geometry Changes Propagate

One boundary decision can affect several downstream views even when no pollen, archaeology, hydrography, or ancient-DNA record changes:

flowchart TD
    Geometry["normalized country geometry"] --> Membership["country membership"]
    Geometry --> Extent["map extent and framing"]
    Membership --> Country["country products"]
    Membership --> Nordic["Nordic composition"]
    Membership --> Counts["scope-specific counts"]
    Extent --> Maps["published map bundles"]
    Country --> Reports["tables and reports"]
    Nordic --> Reports
    Counts --> Reports

The affected outputs must therefore move together. Updating a displayed polygon without recomputing membership leaves the map and its counts in different geographic states. Recomputing membership without preserving the boundary snapshot makes the cause of a changed count impossible to recover.

What A Boundary Decision Means

A point selected into a country product intersects the geometry used by that product under its declared rule. The decision does not establish:

• historical nationality or cultural affiliation;
• locality precision beyond the point's own coordinate evidence;
• temporal overlap with any record in the same country;
• source completeness within the polygon; or
• scientific support from the boundary itself.

Modern framing and historical evidence remain different claims. A broad or region-only locality cannot acquire exact country membership through an arbitrary representative point.

Audit A Scope Change

When a record enters or leaves a country bundle, compare three identities:

1. the evidence record and its coordinate provenance;
2. the boundary collection version and normalized digest; and
3. the product geography registry and selection rule.

An unchanged evidence record with changed boundary membership is a framing change. An unchanged boundary with revised coordinates is an evidence change. An unchanged pair with different product membership is a scope or admission change. Keeping those causes separate prevents geographic filtering from masquerading as new scientific evidence.

Observed difference	First authority to inspect	Interpretation
polygon outline changed	normalized boundary digest	boundary collection changed
record moved across an unchanged outline	record coordinate provenance	evidence location changed
membership changed while both are stable	product selection rule	publication scope changed
map outline changed but counts did not	published bundle lineage	geometry and membership may be out of sync

Country membership is a reproducible predicate, not a property that upgrades the underlying record. A point may be inside the current Sweden polygon while remaining historically ambiguous, coarsely located, or temporally unrelated to every other point in that product.

Membership Decision Receipt

Every reusable geography decision retains both sides of the predicate:

Receipt field	Why it is required
evidence member	stable object identity and the coordinate or geometry claim evaluated
spatial basis	reported, resolved, representative, centroid, or other governed geometry method
boundary identity	collection version, normalized digest, country feature, and coordinate reference system
predicate	containment or intersection method, including edge handling
decision scope	country, Nordic composition, or another named product geography
outcome	included, outside scope, spatially unresolved, or refused
product effect	affected manifest member, exclusion, count, and parent–child relation

flowchart LR
    Member["evidence geometry and basis"] --> Predicate["versioned spatial predicate"]
    Boundary["boundary geometry and digest"] --> Predicate
    Predicate --> Outcome["membership outcome"]
    Scope["declared product geography"] --> Outcome
    Outcome --> Receipt["scope decision receipt"]

This receipt prevents a country label copied into a downstream table from becoming the authority for membership. It also makes edge cases reviewable without silently moving a source coordinate to force a desired country result.

Continue to boundary exports for reuse, maps for rendering, and publication reports for scope lineage.