Census data tool proposal

Dustin Carlino

Census data for any boundary polygon

What

  • Web tool: Draw a boundary, get demographic breakdown of people living / working there
  • and an API: from any language, give a boundary polygon, and get demographic breakdown
  • Worldwide scope, “pay as you go” model for data

Why

  • How many people live near a bus stop or bike-share station?
    • Between 18-30, employed, not owning a vehicle…
  • Who lives inside a proposed low-traffic neighborhood, or nearby where traffic is expected to detour in the short-term?
  • Are air-quality sensors equitably distributed? https://github.com/alan-turing-institute/spatial-inequality
  • Input into synthetic population pipelines

Many researchers reinventing the same wheel – why?

How (the data)

  • One pipeline transforming region-specific data sources into one format
    • US census (census block)
    • UK census (output area)
    • Brazil (enumeration area)
  • Use the smallest geography available
    • and intersect with the input boundary area, scale numbers accordingly
  • WorldPop fallback

How (the code)

  • idea: store in one FlatGeobuf file
  • Rust client library
    • Bindings for any language, cross-platform, WebAssembly, Jupyter notebooks

Alternatives considered