Batch Circular Profiling and Address List Processing
Standard and Custom Geospatial Services from the MCDC
Basic Definitions
- Address List
- An address list is a list (in machine-readable format) of street addresses. More generally, it is a collection of entities that have a spatial location associated with them. A street address, including city, state, and ZIP Code, is such an entity. For the purposes of this product, the location must be within the United States and must already contain either latitude/longitude coordinates or some other information (such as a street address) that allow it to be geocoded to have such coordinates appended. Some examples of address lists:
- A file containing the street address, city, state, and ZIP code of every Starbucks restaurant in the state of California.
- A file containing one record for every nuclear power plant in the United States, containing the latitude and longitude coordinates of each site.
- A file maintained by the state with the address of every visitor to any of the state's parks within the past 10 years.
- Geospatial Service
- A geospatial service is any processing of the location data on an address list that provides information regarding those locations. This information can be provided at either the location level (one set of information for every location on the address list), or it can be a summary of those locations, such as the number of locations located in rural areas or in predominently poor or Hispanic neighborhoods. The primary service offered by the batch CAPS system involves the creation of data describing the characteristics of an n-mile radius of the locations. For example, we can provide the number of persons living within a 20-mile radius of each of those nuclear power plants. We can also tell you what the poverty rate and median household income are for each of those 20-mile circular areas.
Geospatial Services Available from MCDC
We specialize in data from the Census Bureau and other government agencies, and in issues of Census and related geography. Our basic web applications (the CAPS applications) allow users to generate circular area profiles around specified locations. For users having long lists of many locations — generally more than one thousand — we can do "batch" (bulk) processing for each location on the client's address file. Please inquire about very specific needs; generally we can adapt to accommodate many types of request.
Standard Service Products
- Geocoding level 1
- Geocoding from an address. Input is a city-style street address (no rural route, P.O. box, or intersections). ZIP code or city/state required. Preprocessing to identify the street address (from among multiple address fields) and/or edit them is extra. The results are latitude/longitude coordinates and latest (2010) state, county, tract, and census block codes. Matching is done against the latest Census Bureau's TIGER-based address file; match rates can vary widely, depending on the nature of the address list. Rural areas and areas with newer construction may have relatively poor match rates. Service does not include any processing of non-matches other than to provide user with a separate file of unmatched records ("misses") with a reason for the miss.
- Geocoding level 2
- Geocoding to add user-specified geographic codes (such as urban/rural, place, county subdivision, state legislsative district, etc.) when 2010 census block code is already available on the input list.
- CAPS ACS
- Client may specify up to five radius values, between 1 and 50 miles, and whether they want to use block groups or census tracts as the geographic units to use when estimating the circular area. For each location/radius, our standard ACS profile variables are written to an output file in the preferred format (CSV, DBF, or SAS dataset).
- CAPS 2010
- Same idea as CAPS ACS, except choice of geographies is between block and block group. The data that will be aggregated for the circular areas is the MCDC's standard profile based on 2010 Summary File 1 data.
Service Charges
All MCDC geospatial and list-processing services are priced at $125 per hour (as of January 2022) for setup, testing, running the request, verification, and delivery, with a one-hour minimum charge. Estimates are free.
Send your request details, including the number of records or locations in your source file, to Glenn Rice at MCDC.
Web Scraping Policy
We periodically review our web server and SAS application logs for signs of abuse by "bad bots" and web-scraping tools. Egregious abusers will be blocked by IP address or IP range. If you are a legitimate researcher with a project that requires many repeated, automated requests to our web applications, please consider purchasing our bulk services. At the very least, please contact us to ask permission or include your contact information in your bot's user-agent string; we may provide exceptions for ethical data harvesters, subject to availability.