The coastline of the GAUL is mostly compliant with the coast of the International Boundary map delivered by the UN Cartographic Section except for some countries (e.g. Vietnam, India, Bangladesh, etc.)
This means that the effort to maintain the links between thematic data and associated administrative units is reduced to a minimum.
The implementation of the GAUL initiative is based on a collaborative work among international agencies and national authorities generating and collecting spatial information on administrative units.
Once a year, an updated version of the GAUL set is released through Geonetwork Archived 2008-12-01 at the Wayback Machine.
The dataset is free of charge and it can be downloaded by login (to receive an account, just send an email to the contacts listed at the bottom of this article).