"Jurisdiction" - unique ID

[adamajm]

Sorry if this is covered somewhere and I missed it, I'm moving our City of Raleigh data to this standard and wondering if you are using a national database (census?) for unique identifiers for city/county/etc jurisdictions, or are you just using the name = "City of Raleigh"?

[mmartin78]

I would recommend to use the census id. For OpenPermit which schema is compliant with BLDS we specify census id, but I believe BLDS has left it open.

[mheadd]

@adamajm That's a good question. The field is not required, and there is also an optional Publisher field. There are several examples of jurisdictions publishing BLDS data without that field.

That said, this should probably be an item for discussion at some point

[jwthomp1313]

We're currently using it to differentiate between county jurisdictions (Douglas County, Town of Parker, etc.) when looking to combine data from separate government entities. We could conceivably switch to census id, however.

[ARolek]

@mmartin78 where are you obtaining your list of census jurisdiction ids? FIPS codes work for counties and states, but AFAIK not for cities.

[mmartin78]

@ARolek Please see here: http://www2.census.gov/geo/docs/reference/codes/files/national_places.txt

[ARolek]

@mmartin78 thanks for the link. Is there a shapefile with polygon boundaries that accompanies this list?