
The United States API and How We Use It - dget
https://medium.com/@dget/the-united-states-api-and-how-remix-uses-it-5c4b21f5b332
======
rmason
Loveland Technologies in Detroit is another company using open data. They're
mapping parcels across the US.

[https://nextcity.org/features/view/detroit-foreclosures-
tax-...](https://nextcity.org/features/view/detroit-foreclosures-tax-auction-
loveland-technologies-jerry-paffendorf)

------
rattray
What format is the census data?

~~~
dget
I'm hoping to write an expanded post about this, but for now: we're using the
2009-2013 American Community Survey (a product the Census Bureau puts out
yearly, rather than the every-ten-years Census). You can download CSVs of the
whole thing here: [http://www2.census.gov/programs-
surveys/acs/summary_file/201...](http://www2.census.gov/programs-
surveys/acs/summary_file/2013/data/). We took those and TIGER data (geospatial
data specifying what areas each of the stats in the CSV correspond to), and
put them into a Postgres db with PostGIS.

If you're not looking to show the whole US at a granular level like we are,
you might be able to skip the FTP server approach a few ways. They recently
released CitySDK
([https://uscensusbureau.github.io/citysdk/](https://uscensusbureau.github.io/citysdk/)),
which seems like a nice way to get at Census data from the browser, though I
haven't personally used it. There's also a set of APIs
([https://www.census.gov/data/developers/data-
sets.html](https://www.census.gov/data/developers/data-sets.html)), which
might work depending on what specifically you're trying to do. A third way to
get at it is to use American FactFinder
([http://factfinder.census.gov/faces/nav/jsf/pages/index.xhtml](http://factfinder.census.gov/faces/nav/jsf/pages/index.xhtml)),
which lets you drill in and search for whatever fields and/or geographies you
care about, and export them.

If you just want to browse around Census data, I also love Census Reporter
([http://censusreporter.org](http://censusreporter.org)).

~~~
mistermann
If it's not harmful to any competitive advantages you have, it would be lovely
if you could do a blog post of all the open data sources you know of (or, are
there any directories that maintain up to date lists of open data sources?)

~~~
j_s
[https://github.com/caesar0301/awesome-public-
datasets](https://github.com/caesar0301/awesome-public-datasets) is a start

