Local geolocation to FIPS county using Latitude and Longitude

Question

I have millions of lat,long pairs which I want to convert to FIPS county codes that match with the US census data. In the past I used the census block api but that is too slow for the amount of numbers that I have. Is there a better library / tool that I can load locally ? If not would be possible to use the TIGER data from the census website to create a service like that ? What knowledge is required (projections, minimum distances, ...) ?

Answer 1

Please check out http://www.datasciencetoolkit.org/ a ready to use virtual machine(VM) for geocoding and reverse geocoding, it provides useful information including FIPS codes.

i hope it will help.

Answer 2

See this FFC site, it has moved: https://geo.fcc.gov/api/census/#!/area/get_area

And some python 3 code to get the data:

import urllib, json, requests

with urllib.request.urlopen("https://geo.fcc.gov/api/census/area?lat=42.3295&lon=-71.0826&format=json") as url:
    data = json.loads(url.read().decode())
    print(data)

print(json.dumps(data, indent=4, sort_keys=True))

print(data['results'][0]['state_fips'])
print(data['results'][0]['county_fips'])
print(data['results'][0]['county_name'])

Answer 3

You can use FCC Conversion API

For example: http://data.fcc.gov/api/block/find?format=json&latitude=28.35975&longitude=-81.421988&showall=true