Early-stage · solo project

An open-data API for U.S. addresses.
Still early.

FastOpenData is a one-person project working toward a single clean API over U.S. geographic, demographic, and address data. Today it can geocode an address. Joining that against Census, TIGER, and OpenStreetMap data is real, working ETL code in the repo — it's just not wired up to the live API yet.

POST /structured_geocode — real, working today
# Geocode a US address (self-hosted Nominatim under the hood)
curl -X POST http://<host>:8000/structured_geocode \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $TOKEN" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"street": "350 5th Ave", "city": "New York", "state": "NY"}'

Response · actual shape
{
  "place_id": 127365481,
  "licence": "Data © OpenStreetMap contributors, ODbL 1.0",
  "osm_type": "way",
  "lat": 40.7484, "lon": -73.9857,
  "display_name": "350, 5th Avenue, Manhattan, New York, NY",
  "category": "building",
  "importance": 0.71
  // this is a thin pass-through of Nominatim's response —
  // no demographic/Census enrichment yet
}
v0.0.1
Alpha, pre-release
1
Endpoint live (geocoding)
1
Person building it
8+
Datasets planned (in ETL, not yet live)
Where things actually stand

What's real today, and what's next.

No SDK, no schema, no dashboard is required for what currently works — just one endpoint.

Live today

Structured address → geocode.

Send a street/city/state, get back a Nominatim geocoding result (coordinates, OSM place data). That's the entire live surface area right now.

Built, not wired up

ETL pipelines for real datasets.

The repo already has working ingestion code for Census ACS/PUMS, TIGER/Line, OpenStreetMap, SIPP, AHS, Wikidata, and Foursquare Places — built for a graph engine, not yet exposed as address-lookup fields via this API.

Planned

One enriched response per address.

The goal is still a single call that returns geocoding plus joined demographic/geographic fields. Getting there is the roadmap — it isn't done yet.

Data catalog

Real ingestion code. Not a live catalog yet.

These are the actual datasets the ETL pipeline in this repo is built to ingest — none of them are joined into the address-lookup API today.

See the planned field catalog

Early, and built in the open.

This is a solo project, developed in public. If you want to see where it's headed or follow along as it grows, the source is the most honest place to look.