Public Data Application Urls

This library defines a set of Application Urls and Row Generators that allow access to public datasets. For instance, using the Census Reporter URLs, you can define access to a American Community Survey data table on the Census Reporter website. Then, using the associated Row Generator, you can download the data as a sequences of rows.

For instance, this code will return rows from ACS table B17001 for tracts in San Diego County

from publicdata import  parse_app_url

url = parse_app_url("census://CA/140/B17001")

# Or: url = CensusReporterUrl(table='B17001',summarylevel='140',geoid='CA')

for row in url.generator:
    print(row)

The library uses the appurl and rowgenerator python entrypoints, so all libraries that you install that use the entrypoints can be accessed via the parse_app_url and get_generator functions.

Goals

The ADSFree online book has an excellent list of datasets ( and R code for downloading them ) that this library should incorporate. The author also has downloading code for these datasets in the lowdown R package