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.
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.