The Census Data Helper provides a chatbot, as well as a written guide on how to access and make sense of the Census Data. This guide will also help you learn some basic SQL too.
The database and data have been forked from the UK Data Service Infuse2011 table.
If you have any questions feel free contact me via twitter @mountaincows.
I have provided a SQL dump of the simplified table which can be downloaded. I would recommend reading the documentation to fully understand what is going on. If you find something on the database that isn't documented, please get in touch.
Due to the size of the SQL Table, we have also released a minifed version of the table. This table only includes metadata, meaning you can play around with the different tables and learn how to get the data. Once you're comfortable with this, I'd recommend proceeding to the larger download
Download the minified SQL Dump, census-data-explorer-simplified.sql.zip
At Jisc we have created a guest account for user's to access the data free of charge. Guest's will only be able to perform SELECT queries. We currently have the data stored in a MySQL database with the following credentials:
host: localhost:3306
user: root
password: passwordYou will be able to connect to the database using the MySQL CLI or you can download MySQL Workbench.
If you have never used SQL before, this is fine. All the queries in this documentation are relatively straight forward. SQL has the benefit of being human readable.
If you're interested in learning SQL, W3 Shools has a great SQL Tutorial.
If you just want a quick overview, you can view our Understaind SQL Page.
We provide a JavaScript and Python SDK. They can be found here:
- Census Data JavaScript SDK (todo)
- Census Data Python SDK (todo)
We provide a REST API as well as a GraphQL API, documentation for these can be found here:
- Census Data REST API (todo)
- Census Data GraphQL API (todo)
In this section you will find information regarding the following:
It is good to know what these actually are before querying the data.
Every piece of census data you will find has some location/location type attached to it, these different types can be found in the GL_EXTENTS field. If you want to learn more about each field, check out the links below.
- 2000 - United Kingdom (todo)
- 2001 - Great Britain (todo)
- 2002 - England and Wales as a single entity (todo)
- 2003 - Countries (todo)
- 2004 - Regions (todo)
- 2005 - Counties (todo)
- 2006 - Local Authorities (todo)
- 2007 - Wards and Electoral Divisions
- 2008 - Middle Super Output Areas & Intermediate Zones
- 2009 - Lower Super Output Areas & Data Zones
- 2010 - Output Areas and Small Areas
- 2011 - Merging Local Authorities
- 2012 - Merging Wards & Electoral Division
- 2013 - Workplace Zone Layer (todo)
The following section will describe the main meta data tables.
- codelist_combos
- codelist_cube_description
- codelist_def
- codes
- cube_description
- cellmaps
- geocodes_def (todo)
- geocodes_relation (todo)
- geolevels_def (todo)
- geolevels_relation (todo)
In this section you will find information regarding the most important individual fields.
Going through the tables and column definitions individually can be a bit daunting and abstract. It's often easier to learn these things by going through a few examples. Let's start with a few simple ones:
- How many people are in full-time employment in Wales? (finish off)
- more to come...
Hopefully after doing the examples above you should have good understanding of how to interact with the 2011 Census Data. If you're still struggling, that's fine, these things can often take a while to get to grips with. Feel free to ask the Census Data Helper any questions you have or alternatively drop me a message on twitter @mountaincows.