Spatial Equity Data Tool Documentation

1 Introduction

The Urban Institute’s Spatial Equity Data Tool (SEDT) enables users to upload their own data and quickly assess whether the construction, improvement, and implementation of place-based programs and resources are equitably distributed across neighborhoods and demographic groups.

There are two ways for users to interact with the SEDT:

1. Through the web tool, by visiting the SEDT website and uploading data through the website’s interface (see Chapter 8 for more on the web tool).
2. Through the application programming interface (API), by writing code to programmatically upload data to the API and process the analysis results (see Chapter 9 for more on the API).

Both approaches use the same spatial equity analysis calculations (see Chapter 12) to analyze the user-provided data and return the same results for the same set of inputs. However, some of the options differ across the web tool and the API. We detail differences in Chapter 1.

This documentation provides an overview of the functionality of the tool, how to use the web tool and the API, frequently asked questions about the tool, and new functionality currently under development.

Chapter 1 provides a high-level overview of the tool.

Using the SEDT covers key details about how to use the tool. We encourage all users of the SEDT to read Chapter 2 before beginning their analysis. Chapter 2 provides a checklist of questions to help users choose the tool specifications that are best suited to their analysis question. Other chapters go into more detail on these options.

API covers how to use the public application programming interface (API). Chapter 9 discusses how to call the API directly using Python and through the sedtR R package. Other chapters provide more detail on using additional custom baseline datasets for the demographic and geographic disparity calculations (Chapter 10) and common warnings and errors you may see from the API (Chapter 11).

The Methodology section dives into how the SEDT works. Chapter 12 breaks down how the tool performs an analysis step by step. Chapter 14 describes how the tool estimates statistical significance for geographic and demographic disparity scores. Chapter 13 describes how we created the city boundaries, and Chapter 15 describes the tool’s current limitations.

Under Development describes features that the Urban team is working on but have yet to be fully released. Currently, the only chapter in this section is Chapter 19, which describes using travel sheds. As we develop new functionality, we will expand this section.

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Questions:

For questions, please contact sedt@urban.org.

Citation:

Please use the appropriate citation in Chapter 21, in your organization’s style, when citing this project.