FOSS4G Calgary

CensusMapper and {cancensus}, putting the "open" into StatCan Open Data

CensusMapper is an open platform to allow anyone to easily create interactive maps based on Canadian census data, share those maps, and browse maps created by others. It also implements an API server for targeted access to census data for research, facilitated further by the {cancensus} R package.

This talk provides an overview of these open data tools and what's we are hoping to accomplish in the future.


Statistics Canada opened up Census data in 2012, but infrastructure to make that data accessible by non-experts has been lacking.

CensusMapper aims to fill this gap by allowing anyone to map and browse Canadian census data for the 2001, 2006, 2011 and 2016 censuses with a couple of mouse clicks. The CensusMapper API server enables targeted access to census data. The {cancensus} R package ties directly into the CensusMapper API server with the goal to enable collaborative, reproducible, transparent, and adaptable research.

Over 200k unique users have used CensusMapper to create maps and browse census data, and users have downloaded over 685 million data fields via the CensusMapper API.

These tools have spawned a growing ecosystem of tools to facilitate analysis involving census data. For example, the task of making census data comparable across census in the face of changing geographic regions has been automated using the {TongFen} R package.