This dataset imports and merges the 2025 US Census Gazetteer files with USGS Federal Codes. It updates foundational geographic nodes (Places, Counties, Tracts, ZCTAs, Congressional Districts, etc.) with 2025 boundary representations (land/water area), coordinates (LatLong), and Legal/Statistical Area Descriptions (LSADs), while strictly preserving historical entity identifiers and names from the Knowledge Graph.
Census 2025 Gazetteer Files:
- Source URL: https://www2.census.gov/geo/docs/maps-data/data/gazetteer/2025_Gazetteer/
- Contains geographic coordinates, areas, and legal classifications for US geographies.
USGS National Federal Codes:
- Source URL: https://www.usgs.gov/u.s.-board-on-geographic-names
- Used to determine cross-county containment mappings (
containedInPlace) for US Places.
To execute the complete 2025 Gazetteer pipeline locally and generate the final MCF files, ensure you are in the project root directory and follow the steps below in order.
Ensure the USGS mapping file FederalCodes_National.txt is manually placed inside the gazetteer/ directory. Additionally, you must have the 2018–2022 historical MCF files placed inside the gazetteer/hist_mcf/ directory to allow the pipeline to run the diffing and merging comparisons.
Execute the bash script to fetch and unzip the 2025 Gazetteer files directly from the US Census servers into the gazetteer/raw_data_2025 directory.
download_2025.shParse the raw text files downloaded from the 2025 US Census into the standardized Data Commons MCF format. This script enforces strict historical property orderings, injects required schema prefixes (e.g., schema:City), drops unnecessary ZCTA country-level containments, and formats geographic coordinates (LatLong) and area metrics.
python3 gazetteer.pyMerge the newly generated 2025 MCF data directly onto the existing 2018–2022 historical MCF files. This automated pipeline handles the pure-text "Last-Writer-Wins" merge (2025 data overwrites older data) and safely injects deleted historical names back into the final nodes as alternateName to ensure no historical search context is lost in the Knowledge Graph.
python3 run_pipeline.pyRead the external USGS FederalCodes_National.txt file and cross-reference it against the newly merged 2025 Place MCFs. Because some cities cross multiple county lines, this script aggregates all valid county intersections for a given place and generates accurate, comma-separated geographic containment strings (containedInPlace).
python3 place_usgs.py