zip-code-data-hacking by Neil Kodner.
From the readme file:
sourcing publicly available files, generate useful zip code-county data.
My goal is to be able to map zip codes to county FIPS codes, without paying. So far, I’m able to produce county fips codes for 41456 counties out of a list of 42523 zip codes.
I was able to find a zip code database from unitedstateszipcodes.org, each zip code had a county name but not a county FIPS code. I was able to find County FIPS codes on the census.gov site through some google hacking.
The data files are in the data directory – I’ll eventuall add code to make sure the latest data files are retrieved at runtime. I didn’t do this yet because I didn’t want to hammer the sites while I was quickly iterating – a local copy did just fine.
In case you are wondering why this mapping between zip codes to county FIPS codes is important:
Federal information processing standards codes (FIPS codes) are a standardized set of numeric or alphabetic codes issued by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) to ensure uniform identification of geographic entities through all federal government agencies. The entities covered include: states and statistically equivalent entities, counties and statistically equivalent entities, named populated and related location entities (such as, places and county subdivisions), and American Indian and Alaska Native areas. (From: Federal Information Processing Standard (FIPS)
To use zip code based data against federal agency data (FIPS), requires this mapping.
I suspect Neil would appreciate your assistance.
I first saw this at Pete Warden’s Five Short Links.