HGIS Canada Knowledge Graph

Canadian Census Subdivisions, 1851–1921 — every place, every census, the full record.

An academic knowledge graph of Canadian historical Census Subdivisions, designed for both human researchers and machine readers (search engines, AI assistants, citation-grounded RAG). This site publishes one page per Census Subdivision per census year, plus an aggregate page per persistent place across all eight censuses, drawn from the Canadian Peoples / TCP boundary files and census tabulations.

Built on the work of the HGIS Lab at the University of Saskatchewan and the hgiscanada.usask.ca project, which provides the underlying georeferenced boundary polygons and census-table transcriptions. This site reorganises those data as a queryable knowledge graph and a browseable web of per-place prose pages.

Browse by province

What's on each page

• A prose summary describing the place in that census year
• Population total + sex split, where the census recorded them
• The full census record — every variable recorded for that subdivision in that year, grouped into collapsible category tables (Population, Age, Ethnic origin, Religion, Buildings, Agriculture, Manufacturing, Fisheries, Deaths)
• Cross-year population trajectory linking the same place across all 8 censuses, stitched together by spatial polygon overlap
• Neighbouring CSDs in that census year, internally linked
• Boundary continuity links to overlapping CSDs in adjacent census years (CONTAINS / WITHIN / OVERLAPS) so chains across boundary changes are traceable
• Wikidata grounding where available, plus internal persistent place IDs and the source TCP UID
• Schema.org JSON-LD for structured-data crawlers
• Source citation pointing back to the underlying TCP / Borealis dataset

Coverage

Plus an aggregate per persistent place across all years (~12,798 place-index pages).

Sample pages

• Westmeath, Ontario (1871) — Wikidata-grounded rural Ontario township, validated against pilot benchmarks
• Pembroke, Ontario (1851) — Demonstrates boundary-continuity linking — Pembroke split into rural + town versions in 1861
• Alfred, Ontario (1851) — Wikidata-grounded, eight-year trajectory

For researchers

This site is the human-readable surface of a larger knowledge-graph project. The underlying data is also published as:

• A KuzuDB property graph (for researchers using coding agents like Claude Code, or for SPARQL/Cypher-style queries against the full dataset)
• A CIDOC-CRM Turtle export (for the LINCS Linked Open Data ecosystem and other LOD consumers)
• The per-place pages on this site (for citation-grounded research, classroom use, and chatbot retrieval)

See the About / Methodology page for the full data pipeline, identity model, and grounding methodology, or visit the project repository for code, the knowledge graph itself, and reproducibility.

How to cite

Clifford, J. (2026). HGIS Canada Knowledge Graph: Census Subdivisions, 1851–1921 [Web resource]. Built on the Canadian Peoples / TCP project. Available at https://jimclifford.ca/hgiscanada/.

For specific places, cite the page directly using its URL — each year-page and place-index page has a stable canonical URL.

Acknowledgments

The underlying census polygons and tabulations are from the Canadian Peoples / TCP project, hosted by Borealis Dataverse and developed at the HGIS Lab, University of Saskatchewan. Wikidata grounding is performed via an MCP-assisted disambiguation pipeline. Spatial overlap chains and persistent-place identification follow methodology developed within the project.