census

What This Skill Does

The census skill provides OpenClaw agents with direct, programmatic access to the United States Census Bureau's extensive data ecosystem. This skill acts as an interface between your AI agent and official government datasets, allowing for the retrieval of population statistics, American Community Survey (ACS) metrics, economic indicators, and detailed geographic data. By leveraging this tool, an AI agent can ingest complex demographic variables, such as household income, poverty levels, housing vacancy rates, and business establishment patterns, and convert them into actionable intelligence. The tool is designed to work seamlessly with the Census API, supporting various survey types including the decennial census, 1-year and 5-year ACS estimates, and specialized data like County Business Patterns (CBP).

Installation

To integrate this skill into your agent, ensure you have the OpenClaw environment set up. Run the following command in your terminal: clawhub install openclaw/skills/skills/aiwithabidi/census Once installed, you may need to provide a CENSUS_API_KEY environment variable. While some endpoints may work without one, having a registered key from the Census Bureau is highly recommended to ensure stable access and avoid rate-limiting during high-frequency queries.

Use Cases

This skill is indispensable for data-driven decision-making. Urban planners can use it to analyze population density for infrastructure projects. Marketing professionals can leverage demographic and income data to identify target customer segments in specific geographic regions. Real estate analysts can pull housing and poverty data to assess property value trends. Economic researchers can use the CBP data to track business growth and industry concentration across different states and counties.

Example Prompts

1. "Look up the median household income for all states and tell me which three states have the highest levels."
2. "Retrieve the latest ACS 5-year estimate for population counts by state, and present the data as a summary."
3. "Find the number of business establishments in NAICS industry 72 for California and Florida to compare economic activity."

Tips & Limitations

When using the census skill, always be specific with your variable requirements. The Census API uses specific nomenclature (e.g., 'B19013_001E' for median income), so when in doubt, use the list-variables command to verify the exact ID for the metric you need. Remember that geographic data is granular; while state-level data is easy to aggregate, ensure you are requesting the correct FIPS codes or geographic descriptors if you need county or tract-level data. Always process the returned JSON output to filter out null or missing values, as government datasets can sometimes contain incomplete entries depending on the survey year.