The CFO here is working on FCC form 477 and tells me that he needs to
enter census tract and block information for our customers. He says that
the US Census site is worse than useless and the info isn't on the FCC
site.
What are others doing in this regard?
Assuming you have LAT/LONG you can use the FCC API:
http://www.fcc.gov/encyclopedia/form-477-census-tract-information
You also need to provide your coverage. I suggest Towercoverage.com for
that, though you may not be a WISP. Non-wireless I'm not sure how you'd go
about it.
Josh Luthman
Office: 937-552-2340
Direct: 937-552-2343
1100 Wayne St
Suite 1337
Troy, OH 45373
Are you trying to get the census tract for each customer? If so you can
get that from most of the gecoding services like Esri etc.
Non-wireless, we have street address and zip codes, not lat/long.
Well you'll need to translate those into addresses. That should be easy
with Google or Bing.
Josh Luthman
Office: 937-552-2340
Direct: 937-552-2343
1100 Wayne St
Suite 1337
Troy, OH 45373
We have the addresses, need census tract and block.
For small address batches you can use the Census Geocoder. The documentation is at
http://www.census.gov/geo/maps-data/data/geocoder.html
Basically you upload a CSV file addresses and you'll get back FIPS
codes for state, county, census tract and census block for each address. Concatenate the FIPS state+county+censustract code (not the census block).
If you have lots of customers in many different census tracts, you'll
probably want a bulk geocoding product.
Address to lat/lng using google api
http://maps.googleapis.com/maps/api/geocode/json?address=$address&sensor=true
Lat/Lng to Census Block via FCC
http://data.fcc.gov/api/block/2010/find?latitude=$latitude&longitude=$longitude&showall=true&format=JSON
Use Sam's suggestions.
Josh Luthman
Office: 937-552-2340
Direct: 937-552-2343
1100 Wayne St
Suite 1337
Troy, OH 45373
The US Census Tiger data set is available from their FTP site in
Shapefile format. PostGIS (the spatial extension to PostgreSQL)
includes the Tiger geocoder which can be used to geocode addresses,
based on that Census data.
The PostGIS Tiger extension also includes scripts to load the data into
a PostGIS-enabled PostgreSQL database.
If there are questions about the geocoder, I can try and answer them, I
had a hand in writing it.
Thanks!
Stephen
This turns out to be the least hassle, thanks to all in the group who
replied. Note that although the Census website says that it will handle
a CSV file of up to 1000 addresses, in reality it pukes on anything
greater than about 100 at a time.