A researcher is looking for demographic information at the CCS level. Specifically, her question is:
“whether we can have detailed data, including population (by age), area, language, education, income, labor, mobility, etc., and whether we can connect a particular place with a CCS, for instance, by a post code. Also, we were told that CCS boundary is changing over time. So the question is can we have the CCS data on the basis of 1996 or 2006 boundary, so that we can know the dynamics of the communities.”
Answer
If I have understood your question correctly, you can aggregate census data up to the the CCS level, as the CCSUID is embedded in both the CSD and DA geography files. So if you join the census data at these levels you could then dissolve on the CCSIUD and Sum the associated attributes.
As far as postal codes go, I took a quick look at the most recent PCCF pdf and it does have an attribute field with a direct link to the CCS. If you have your postal codes all ready in GIS format you could overlay postal codes on top of the CCS geographic file, and using a spatial join append the CCSUID to the postal codes.
As for the boundary change, there is a change from previous years, however I have found the CCS to be much more stable then say the DAs.
