Announcing the Urban Institute Data Catalog
We believe that data make the biggest impact when they are accessible to everyone.
Today, we are excited to announce the public launch of the Urban Institute Data Catalog, a place to discover, learn about, and download open data provided by Urban Institute researchers and data scientists. You can find data that reflect the breadth of Urban’s expertise — health, education, the workforce, nonprofits, local government finances, and so much more.
Built using open source technology, the catalog holds valuable data and metadata that Urban Institute staff have created, enhanced, cleaned, or otherwise added value to as part of our work. And it will provide, for the first time, a central, searchable resource to find many of Urban’s published open data assets.
We hope that researchers, data analysts, civic tech actors, application developers, and many others will use this tool to enhance their work, save time, and generate insights that elevate the policy debate. As Urban produces data for research, analysis, and data visualization, and as new data are released, we will continue to update the catalog.
We’re thrilled to put the power of data in your hands to better understand and respond to many critical issues facing us locally and nationally.
Here are some current highlights of the Urban Data Catalog — both the data and research products we’ve built using the data — as of this writing:
– LODES data: The Longitudinal Employer-Household Dynamics Origin-Destination Employment Statistics (LODES) from the US Census Bureau provide detailed information on workers and jobs by census block. We have summarized these large, dispersed data into a set of census tract and census place datasets to make them easier to use. For more information, read our earlier Data@Urban blog post.
– Medicaid opioid data: Our Medicaid Spending and Prescriptions for the Treatment of Opioid Use Disorder and Opioid Overdose dataset is sourced from state drug utilization data and provides breakdowns by state, year, quarter, drug type, and brand name or generic drug status. For more information and to view our data visualization using the data, see the complete project page.
– Nonprofit and foundation data: Members of Urban’s National Center for Charitable Statistics (NCCS) compile, clean, and standardize data from the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) on organizations filing IRS forms 990 or 990-EZ, including private charities, foundations, and other tax-exempt organizations. To read more about these data, see our previous blog posts on redesigning our Nonprofit Sector in Brief Report in R and repurposing our open code and data to create your own custom summary tables.
– Education Data Portal: Researchers in Urban’s Center on Education Data and Policy assembles education data in our Education Data Portal from a number of federal sources, standardizes the data, cleans them, and provides them via flat files, an API, a point-and-click tool, and Stata and R packages for public use. Read our previous Data@Urban posts to learn why we built the Education Data Portal, why we power it using an API, how we built the API, and how we built the R and Stata packages for the portal.
– Earned income tax credit data: Researchers in the Tax Policy Center standardize, clean, and create files at different geographic levels based on zip code–level data for low-income individual tax filers. The data tool allows for the creation or download of extracts for specific subsets of the data.
– State and local finance data: Researchers in the Tax Policy Center standardize and clean 40 years of state expenditure data from the US Census Bureau’s Annual Survey of State and Local Government Finances.
