Glossary

What is DataSpine?

Updated September 8, 2026

DataSpine is the sourced record of every place in the United States: 804 attributes in nine categories, economics to food, from 102 live public sources, joined on one code across 331,007 geographies from the nation to the block group, with the source and the vintage kept on every value. Run by SuperTruth.

The nine categories and their counts are economics (266), health (161), demographics (108), environment (73), housing (71), education (41), psychographics (32), food (29) and technology (23). Health is one of the nine. The sources include Census, CDC, County Health Rankings, HUD, BLS, BEA, IRS, FDIC, FCC, Ookla, NCHS, NOAA, EPA, HRSA, USDA, Opportunity Insights, MIT Election Lab, US Religion Census, Zillow, Redfin, EIA, IMLS, CMS and NCES; 108 are cataloged and 102 are live. Together they hold 11,220,406 sourced data points, a count taken 8 Sep 2026 that grows continuously.

Every value carries the source that published it and the vintage it was published for, and every vintage ingested stays on file, so a figure used last year is retrievable with ?vintage=YYYY. Where a source holds no figure for a place the answer is "not on file", never a zero. Gaps can be filled from the nearest published geography, or on request with synthetic households generated from the place's own published distributions; a filled or synthetic value is always labeled and never counted among the sourced figures. No person is in it: every value describes a place.

Where this runs: the Gauntlet, the Truth Agent, VIOLET, Live or Die Here.