census-communities-usa

Mapping and analyzing local business data from the Census Bureau

This the repo for the API that exposes LODES via a JSON api.

The JSON API is served via a flask app. A copy is currently living on heroku. The database is MongoDB. The API and its contents live in /web.

You can see an example of each item in the collection in /data_notes/example_data.json. The data notes folder contains info on the dataset.

The scrapers are live in /scrapers.

Each datapoint represents a census block.

We would like to build an API that allows you to query the census data without having to download entire CSVs.

Installation/Requirements

In order to setup the Census API, you must have a installed copy of mongoDB (Version 2.4 or greater) and at least 200 gb of free space.

By setting the environment variable MONGO_HOST, you can specify which database scrapers/fetch_and_load.py will load into. If this is unset, it will automatically use localhost. You can chose a particular state by calling the program along with a command line argument of a state abbreviation. If no command line argument is supplied, it loads the entire dataset.