geographies_aliases
Alias map from free-text strings to canonical county_id. Populated by the Python geography normalization layer and manually for edge cases (Connecticut 2022 planning regions, IRS pseudo-counties). Use to resolve non-standard county names from source data.
overview
Varies by pipeline run; covers county name variants, IRS pseudo-counties, CT 2022 planning regions, and FIPS integer codes.
current vintage — Maintained continuously
history — Not versioned; reflects current normalization rules
source & licensing
fields
| name | type | definition |
|---|---|---|
| _source | string | Pipeline component or file that added this alias.Pipeline metadata field. |
| aliaskey | string | The raw alias string exactly as it appears in source data, used as the lookup key when resolving non-canonical geography references to a canonical FIPS identifier. |
| alias_type | string | Category classifying the form of the alias (e.g. 'county_name', 'fips_int', 'irs_pseudo'), indicating which source convention produced the string. |
| confidence | string | Confidence level assigned to the alias-to-FIPS resolution (e.g. 'exact', 'fuzzy'), reflecting whether the match was deterministic or required approximate string matching. |
| country_id | string | ISO alpha-2 country code (always 'US' for domestic tables). |
| county_id | string | 5-character FIPS code identifying the county.Joins dim.counties on county_id. |
joins
how to use this table
Aliases are added by src/geographies/ Python loaders: exact FIPS matches, fuzzy county name matching, IRS pseudo-county map, and manual overrides for edge cases.
Production joins in fact tables; this table is an internal normalization artifact. Fact tables already have county_id resolved.
Confidence field is populated inconsistently across alias_type values. Some IRS pseudo-counties (e.g. 'Statewide') resolve to null county_id by design.