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.
The package is available on PyPi, so you can install the latest version using pip:
pip install uscensusYou 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.
The official Census API documention is at https://www.census.gov/developers/
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]
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.]
)[https://www.census.gov/data/developers/data-sets/TIGERweb-map-service.html]
(TIGERweb API directory)[http://tigerweb.geo.census.gov/arcgis/rest/services/TIGERweb]
- improve API and variable discoverability
- improve API documentation generation
- add geocoding API
- add TIGER/maps APIs with geopandas
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
