In some of our projects we use what we call a HEROP_ID to identify geographic boundaries defined by the US Census Bureau, which is a slight variation on the commonly used standard GEOID. Our format is similar to what the American FactFinder used (now data.census.gov).

A HEROP_ID consists of three parts:

1. The 3-digit Summary Level Code for this geography. Common summary level codes are:
   • 040 -- State
   • 050 -- County
   • 140 -- Census Tract
   • 150 -- Census Block Group
   • 860 -- Zip Code Tabulation Area (ZCTA)
2. The 2-letter string US
3. The standard GEOID for the given unit (length depends on unit summary)
   • GEOIDs are, in turn, hierarchical aggregations of FIPS codes

Expanding out the FIPS codes for the five summary levels shown above, the full IDs would look like:

The advantages of this composite ID are:

1. Unique across all geographic areas in the US
2. Will always be forced to string formatting
3. Easy to programmatically change back into the more standard GEOIDs

Convert to GEOID (integers)

The HEROP_ID can be converted back to standard GEOIDs by removing the first 5 characters, or by taking everything after the substring "US". Here are some examples of what this looks like in different software:

• Excel: REPLACE(A1, 1, 5, "")
• R: geoid <- str_split_i(HEROP_ID, "US", -1)
• Python: geoid = HEROP_ID.split("US")[1]
• JavaScript: const geoid = HEROP_ID.split("US")[1]

Within the backend of our OEPS project we have an ETL pipeline that merges, tranforms, and exports data files from the US Census Bureau into a few different geospatial data formats. There are two categories of files:

• Cartographic Boundaries have simplified geometries which makes them ideal for mapping applications learn more
  • We typically use the 500k scale files, though they publish other scales as well
• TIGER/Line Shapefiles have official, unsimplified geometries and should be used for geospatial analysis learn more
  • We don't have these in the pipeline yet, but hope to eventually...

Feel free to download and use these for your own projects.

• GeoJSON A simple plain text format that is good for small to medium size datasets and can be used in a wide variety of web and desktop software learn more
• Shapefiles Used in scripting and desktop software for performant display and analysis learn more

  • Tip: geopandas should allow you to directly open remote zip files with something like this learn more:

      import geopandas as gpd
      gpd.read_file('/vsizip//vsicurl/https://herop-geodata.s3.us-east-2.amazonaws.com/oeps/state-2010-shp.zip
    

• PMTiles A "cloud-native" vector format that is very fast in the right web mapping environment learn more

Note: We don't yet have ZCTA and Place geographies for 2010.

We have a system in place for using Github pages to host our work. One thing to consider when you publish your web app or map is what your want your URL to look like. Consider these approaches:

Example: maps.healthyregions.org/<myproject>

This is more or less the easiest way to integrate your project into our domain. Just create your Github repository with your app as an index.html file in the root, and ask that lab staff add your repo as a submodule in this repository: healthyregions/mapping-projects. No need to deal with Github pages on your repository.

Example: <myproject>.healthyregions.org

In this case you must publish your Github pages repository like normal, and then request that we update our healthyregions DNS to make a subdomain for your project. This will require some extra configuration in your Github pages settings.

Example: <username>.github.io/<myproject>

You can also just independently publish a github repo if you want--no need to integrate with our domain name or URL at all. Just follow the usual steps for getting started Github pages.

Example: <myproject>.com

Finally, you could always purchase your own domain myproject.com from a registrar like NameCheap or GoDaddy (there are a lot of them), publish your own Github repository with Github pages, and then connect the domain to Github pages. Keep in mind that you'll need to continue paying for this domain as long as you want your project to be online. Also, while there are a lot fun and cheap domains today (like $1/year for healthytime.store, as of this writing) prices can and will increase in the future.