Census API helpers

This module fetches metadata for the Census Data API to make it easier to find relevant data sets and variables to query, and returns data as a Pandas dataframe.

See the example notebook for basic usage.

Installation

The package is available on PyPi, so you can install the latest version using pip:

pip install uscensus

API Key

You will need an API key to invoke the census APIs. You can request one here:
http://api.census.gov/data/key_signup.html

In the example notebook, I read an API key from a config file, viz. ~/.census using RawConfigParser.

Census APIs

The official Census API documention is at https://www.census.gov/developers/

Census Data APIs

The Census Data APIs are the first set of interfaces to which this package provides access. These cover the decennial census, American Community Survey, and other data sets for a variety of vintages.

This package uses the (Census Data API Discovery Interface)[https://api.census.gov/data.json] to identify the currently available data sets, and caches the data in a database (eg sqlite3 db). The discovery interface is an instance of the (US Open Project Data Common Core Metadata Schema)[https://project-open-data.cio.gov/schema/].

For detailed documentation, see the (Census Data API User Guide [pdf])[https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/data/developers/api-user-guide/api-guide.pdf]

Geocoder REST services

The Census Bureau offers REST Services for geocoding addresses to canonical form, lon/lat, and Census geographies, based on the Master Address File and TIGER data. These support single address queries as well as a bulk interface for up to 1000 addresses at a time.

This package provides pandas and raw interfaces to both query styles. [Note: not pushed yet, writing test cases.]

TigerWeb REST services

)[https://www.census.gov/data/developers/data-sets/TIGERweb-map-service.html]

(TIGERweb API directory)[http://tigerweb.geo.census.gov/arcgis/rest/services/TIGERweb]

TODOs

• improve API and variable discoverability
• improve API documentation generation
• add geocoding API
• add TIGER/maps APIs with geopandas

License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.