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How was the key registration process experience?

http://pad.human.cornell.edu/Unlisted/uncertaintymap_fullinfo_api_B17001.cfm

 

I had already created a thematic map application that gave information about the uncertainty surrounding ACS estimates (move your mouse over the counties). This website generates the map using API data requests. A future expansion will include parsing the variables XML file.

I have an API request where the get argument that works is "P0030001,P0030002,P0030003,P0030004". However, I wanted to get all available names in that concept, which in total is a list of 8 elements "P0030001,P0030002,P0030003,...P0030008".

 

This request fails with error "unknown variable 'P0030005,P0030006,P0030007,P0030008"

 

Is there a limit on the length for the GET argument?

Happy Friday!

Part of the reason for our requesst that you participate in our testing period is to gather feedback on ways to increase the value of Census API service to you.

I saw in another thread a mention of using SAIPE rather than ACS for Jan's app. It would be helpful to know which datasets are your highest priorities.

Please respond here to suggest which datasets would be most valuable to you as we extend API... more »

As a developer, I think an API to describe and search for SF1 variables will be very useful.

Sample API:
http://thedataweb.rm.census.gov/data/2010/sf1/desc/(parameters)

Usages:
1. http://thedataweb.rm.census.gov/data/2010/sf1/desc/all
returns a JSON array of all SF1 variables and their descriptions.

2. http://thedataweb.rm.census.gov/data/2010/sf1/desc/P0010001
returns information about P0010001 (its name, concept,... more »

Is there any support (yet?) for congressional districts and other lower-level geographies in the ACS API? States and counties work fine, but I run into problems as soon as I start to go a little deeper into the hierarchy. Are most of these other area types only supported for the SF1 data?

When I make the following request:
http://thedataweb.rm.census.gov/data/2010/sf1?key=___&get=P0010001,P0010001,P0010001,P0010001,NAME&for=block+group:*&in=state:2+county:170+tract:000101
I get the following response:
[["P0010001","P0010001","P0010001","P0010001","NAME","state","county","tract","block group"],
["1","620","620","620","620","Block Group 1","02","170","000101"]]
Note that the order of the variable names and... more »

I am trying to make something for all block groups in a county and noticed that I have to make separate requests for each tract.
A block group looks like:
?get=P0010001&for=block+group:*&in=state:2+county:170+tract:000101
but it would be nice if we could request:
?get=P0010001,GEOID&for=block+group:*&in=state:2+county:170
so without specifying the tract.
The added GEOID (just like NAME) would make make each record unique.... more »

New geography resources posted to the Geography section of the website at www.census.gov/developers/

First, let me applaud the Census Bureau for doing this, it's an awesome project.

I'm glad to see JSON as the response format for the API, but structure makes it really hard to use. I also haven't seen this list-of-lists format for individual records before.

What would work much better would be one of the following:

a) an array of objects. Within each object, each field name is a key, each value is the value associated... more »

The XML format for the data dictionary is a great start, but it could be a lot better. In particular, the hierarchical structure of the variables is not mapped.

Let's take P012B049: African American female 85 years and over. It's extremely tedious to tease apart that this is the combination of three variables: race, sex, and age group. One of the great features of XML is its hierarchical structure, which makes it easy... more »

http://pad.human.cornell.edu/Unlisted/api_json.html

Please take a look at the source.

What I tried to do is creating a web page using empty DOM elements and fill them later with Javascript and API calls. The Javascript loops through all elements with class='acs5' and I use the HTML5 data-* custom tags to define what value I would like to see in that element. The browser might throw a warning because I violate same-origin... more »

http://acsmapper.appspot.com/D3

Given the dearth of other live examples, I felt like I should post something, though I haven't been able to do a lot of necessary cleanup and polish. It was nice to be able to pull something like this together with just a few hours of work via the Census API, though.

For a given ACS sub-table (anything with an _002E or higher suffix), I'm calling the data for all US counties and dividing... more »

In all of the "sex by age" sets the "85 years and over" label is duplicated for female. I think the first instance is actually just "female".

 

variable name="P012A026" concept="P12A. Sex By Age (White Alone) [49]">Female: !! 85 years and over

 

variable name="P012A049" concept="P12A. Sex By Age (White Alone) [49]">Female: !! 85 years and over