How to Use Open Civic Data Identifiers to Organize Political Data
Open Civic Data Identifiers (OCD-IDs) are an open data standard for defining the structure of representative government. Having this interoperable standard as part of your political dataset is a useful way to organize civic information, particularly when comparing information across local, state, and national boundaries, or over time.
The Cicero database holds tens of thousands of records of information about political representation and geographic political districts. Cicero customers use these resources in a variety of ways, often mixing Cicero data with other sources of information. For this reason, we include OCD-IDs in all our records.
Read on to learn how this standard works and see a few examples of analysis using OCD-IDs.
Mapping OCD-IDs to government structures
The Open Civic Data documentation explains how the standard was designed, and how new data can fit the standard. The goal is to make it easier and more consistent to gather, maintain, and compare civic information for public benefit.
Rationale:
Divisions can be seen as the smallest building block in the Open Civic Data ecosystem, Jurisdictions and Organizations will exist within a Division and People are elected to represent a Division. As such, providing unique identifiers enables collaboration across groups dealing with any of these types.
To get a sense of how OCD-IDs map to elected governments, here is a sample of 500 identifiers corresponding to elected positions in government in the United States. Unlike names of officials and other details of elected government, OCD-IDs are designed to not change over time, providing a reliable standard.
Click here to open interactive map
Here are some examples, where you see that higher and more general entities sit on top of lower level and specific details, which are consistent across cities, states, and countries.
- Cleveland City Council District 3, ocd-division/country:us/state:oh/place:cleveland/ward:3
- Indianapolis and Marion County City-County Council, ocd-division/country:us/state:in/county:marion/council_district:18
- Massachusetts House of Representatives Barnstable, Dukes & Nantucket district, ocd-division/country:us/state:ma/sldl:barnstable_dukes_and_nantucket
- United States House of Representatives Texas 13, ocd-division/country:us/state:tx/cd:13
Viewing the entities
The format of government varies widely due to quirks of history and law. The OCD-ID standard captures this variety and enables the ability to map and compare equivalent bodies. This snapshot shows all entities in the United States — which is another way to say all the possible structures of US governments mapped and used so far in the OCD-ID standard.
For Canada, the universe of possible government formats is a bit less varied in the OCD-ID public data.
We gathered these entities using a little script, which you are welcome to use to gather entities from other countries.
Connecting datasets
Another crucial use of OCD-IDs is the ability to map disparate datasets. Whether the goal is building an app, planning an advocacy campaign, or GIS work with civic data, sometimes the effort to complete a project multiplies without a standard to merge datasets programmatically.
Political districts to US census data
We experienced this benefit when we ran an analysis last year on how social media use differs between urban and rural politicians.
To run this analysis, we needed to compare 2 sets of information:
- State and local elected officials availability of social media accounts
- Demographic statistics of the areas they represent
To accomplish this, we needed the census identifiers (known in Census lingo as FIPS codes) for the territory represented by each official to gather data from the Census API. We did not have these, so we used the OCD-ID resource to map our records to Census IDs, and then got the info we needed from Census datasets.
Find more civic data
If you’re interested in learning more about how OCD-IDs can be used to organize and merge political datasets, you can view the entire corpus of publicly collected and curated OCD-IDs in this open source github repo. To access OCD-IDs in Cicero’s data, check out our docs.
