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U.S. OCD Division Identifier Quirks

This page details some of the quirks of poltical division in the United States and will help you navigate U.S. identifiers. You should have already read the overall project's documention.

There is only one rule about U.S. political geography: “There are no hard and fast rules regarding U.S. political geography.” (h/t Jonathan Tomer)

With that in mind, below are some interesting OCD Identifiers that might not seem obvious at first. Also, a Google-spreadsheet-based validator is available to check all of your identifiers (especially for those you are unsure about); the spreadsheet also provides suggestions for unmatched identifiers.

state

  • The District of Columbia is: cd-division/country:us/district:dc
  • Territories also are included:
    • Example (American Samoa): ocd-division/country:us/territory:as

county

  • Residents of DC (or the territories) do not have a county.
  • Alaska has borough and census_area types
  • Louisiana has parishes
  • The residents of independent cities of Virignia do not have counties
    • Important: Some independent cities have the same name as counties. Care must be taken
  • Similarly Maryland, Missouri and Nevada each has one independent city

place

  • Drop "city", "township", "borough" (etc) from the name of a place type unless the word city is in the census’s place gazetteer file. Two examples:
  • Sometimes, for disambiguity, place reisdes under county. Example:
    • ocd-division/country:us/state:pa/county:adams/place:liberty
  • The following are consolidated city-counties with coterminous boundaries. Only one identifier (the county: identifier) is included in the canonical list to avoid confusion. To further help users, an exceptions file lists all of the identifiers that one might expect to exist, but do not.
    • Anchorage, AK
    • Juneau, AK
    • Sitka, AK
    • Wrangell, AK
    • San Francisco, CA
    • Broomfield, CO
    • Denver, CO
    • Columbus, GA (Muscogee County)
    • Lexington, KY (Fayette County)
    • New Orleans, LA
    • Nantucket, MA
    • Anaconda, MT (Silver Bow County)
    • Lynchburg, TN (Moore County)
    • Not on this list: Cusetta, GA is not coterminous with its county despite having the same government
    • Not on this list: Georgetown, GA is not coterminous with its county despite having the same government
    • Not on this list: Philadelphia, PA is not on this list because the county and city play different roles in governance.
    • Not on this list: Butte-Silver Bow County, MT is not on this list because they are not coterminous. The census-recognized town of Walkerville is also in the county
  • The exceptions file, which is a superset of the above list, has three fields in the following order:
    • Non-canonical identifier (i.e., the one you should not use)
    • Associated canonical identifier -- use this one
    • Note for why this association exists
  • The whitelist file picks up places that the Census scraper misses. It has two fields:
    • Canonical identifier
    • Note for why the census scraper misses this jurisdiction

cd

  • At-large congressional districts (AK, DE, MT, ND, SD, VT, WY) have at-large in their identifier instead of a number.

sldl (State Legislature distict -- lower)

  • Remember to keep all letter lowercase. Example:
    • ocd-division/country:us/state:md/sldl:12b
  • Nebraska has no lower house
  • The states of MA, VT, NH have interesting names district names, rather than numbers. Use the naming convention.

sldu (State Legislature distict -- upper)

  • The states of MA and VT have interesting names for their upper house districts. Use the naming convention.

council_district

  • For ease, all types of local councils that have custom districts -- whether they are called city council, board of supervisors, town council, or common council -- use the type council_district. Examples:
    • ocd-division/country:us/state:md/place:baltimore/council_district:1
    • ocd-division/country:us/state:va/county:fairfax/council_district:providence
  • Sometimes the council districts are not custom district -- a city might reuse wards, for instance. In these cases, to avoid redundancy, we only put ward in the repository.
  • Occasionally (and namely, for Indiana counties), a single governmental entity (e.g., Lake County Indidana) will have multiple bodies that use different districts. In these cases, we strive to use the "council_district" for the governmental body with "council" in its name and use a custom type for the other body (e.g., commissioner district).

ward

  • Sometimes wards (and council_districts) will be labeled using roman numerals (i, ii, iii, iv, etc). These are converted to arabic numerals (1, 2, 3, 4, etc).

region

  • The Oregon Metro council is in the repository:
    • ocd-division/country:us/state:or/region:oregon_metro
  • The Metro council also has districts
    • ocd-division/country:us/state:or/region:oregon_metro/council_district:1

precinct

  • Precincts are slowly being added (as of January 2014). Notes:
    • If a precinct (i.e., voting tabulation district, election district) is called a "ward" generally the ward type is used. Otherwise, the precinct type is used.
    • Often, precincts will have both a unique county or state ID as well as a descriptor. In this case, the number will go first (no zero padding), then a hyphen ("-"), then the descriptor. See parts of Idaho.
    • Other times, a descriptor will include a number. For instance, Canton County might have the precincts Tenley 1, Tenley 2, Lincoln 1, and Lincoln 2. In this case, only a space (which is converted to an underscore) separates the text and the number. See parts of Idaho and Vermont.