> <i>The response for all queries is formatted as a two dimensional JSON array where the first row provides column names and subsequent rows provide data values.</i><p>Hmmm... looking at the example of this I can't help but think there has got to be a better way. This is more just a standard CSV (first row is header, all other rows are data). Using JSON for data formatted as such is kind of a waste of JSON. If you pass that example into a JSON decoder you get an extremely more difficult to use object. Am I missing something? or is this just typical "the government doesn't do tech properly" stuff?<p>EDIT: sorry, I try to be less negative but sometimes it is hard. I do applaud them for at least making the info available. I don't have a use for it but if some else does then dealing with a stupid format is better than not having data at all.<p>EDIT2: (to clarify) I was not saying the data <i>should</i> just be CSV... I'm saying it <i>is</i> and that defeats the purpose of using JSON. They should still use JSON but with their data formatted differently. Using their example, properly closed but truncated to just to first 2 records, the PHP function json_decode() turns it into this array:<p><pre><code> array (
0 => array (
0 => 'P0010001',
1 => 'NAME',
2 => 'state',
),
1 => array (
0 => '710231',
1 => 'Alaska',
2 => '02',
),
2 => array (
0 => '4779736',
1 => 'Alabama',
2 => '01',
),
)
</code></pre>
I don't find that format to be very pleasant.
Wow, this is good government. I can nitpick the API details, but this is one giant leap in the right direction.<p>Under US law, the federal government can't claim copyright on works produced via tax dollars (makes sense). Since the feds can't require us to provide attribution for all this helpful data, how do we as a community advocate for more open data like this?
If anyone is interested, the FCC has a fairly comprehensive list of Developers pages for other federal agencies: <a href="http://www.fcc.gov/developers" rel="nofollow">http://www.fcc.gov/developers</a> (on the right column).<p>Also, for further reading on the topic of .gov APIs, <a href="http://ben.balter.com/2012/06/02/publishing-government-data-that-developers-will-actually-use/" rel="nofollow">http://ben.balter.com/2012/06/02/publishing-government-data-...</a> is a great start.
Cool, especially since the census is one of the main reasons why we have computers at all.<p>I went to the Computer History Museum a few months back, and when we were looking through the origins of the modern computer, a lot of it traces back to census needs: we needed to automate the counting of large quantities of uniformly formatted data, so we used punchcards to tally up the data.<p>Fast forward to 2012, and the census is now getting an API. Weird how that works.
It's pretty cool that they are putting up the machine time to run queries on the data. I wonder how long it will last if someone makes a popular web app using the census API.
Slightly OT, but UK census data can also be accessed by a web API. Some details are at <a href="http://www.programmableweb.com/api/office-for-national-statistics" rel="nofollow">http://www.programmableweb.com/api/office-for-national-stati...</a>.<p>The bad news is that it appears to be SOAP-based.
Has anyone considered possible use-cases for this dataset?<p>It's great to get excited about the data format, but actual use-cases currently seem a little limited to me. Of course this will hopefully change as more and more datasets become available.
You need to request a "key" (essentially a user ID) before you can make queries.<p>I can imagine only 3 reasons for this: (1) they want to make you agree to the Terms & Conditions, (2) it gives a way to choke off a DDOS attack that makes repeated complex queries, or (3) the census bureau wants to track how you are using its service.<p>The key is indeed easy to get, but I observe that Google would have exactly the same concerns as 1,2,&3 above, yet they somehow manage to stay in business without making their users sign up to do a web search.<p>The federal government always makes things a little more complicated.