geography-based population category Asian This category was created to accommodate US, UK and EU use of super-national geographic descriptors in non-genetic contexts, to enable researchers to accurately annotate data, prevent loss of data, and comply with local governmental and funding standards around data collection. Individuals who self-identify or are described by authors as Asian, without any reference to validated genetic ancestry information and where there was not sufficient information to allow description as East Asian, Central Asian, South Asian or South-East Asian.