Un portail web de cartographie interactive des recensements égyptiens sur deux siècles (1882-2017)

Egypt, the third country on the African continent and the first Arab country by demographic weight (93 million inhabitants in 2017), is one of the few countries south of the Mediterranean to have had a full and regular census of its population for two centuries. The first published censuses date back to 1882 and 1897. Since then, they have been conducted about every ten years until today, providing a valuable set of demographic, social and economic indicators (gender, age, occupation, economic status, level of education, etc.). The level of spatialization of the results from these fourteen censuses is of remarkable consistency and refinement, offering an exceptional heritage collection of statistics, with more than 20 million demographic and socio-economic data available.Data from previous censuses (1986, 1976, 1966) are recorded in books that can be bought at CAPMAS (Central Agency for Public Mobilization and Statistics). Other interdisciplinary research teams shared data on Egypt, including the Mediterranean Demographic Observatory, whose website contains a demographic database and an interactive atlas on all Mediterranean countries, offering comparative perspectives within the Mediterranean region (http://demomed.org/index.php/en/). However, this portal does not offer access to the socio-economic indicators contained in the Egyptian censuses; it only provides data on population and its structure, whereas the interactive atlas offers a single variable (population density) at a first-level analysis scale (governorate) for the sake of data harmonization at the pan-Euro-Mediterranean scale. In short, this existing mapping tool is not available at the intermediate scale of Egyptian cantons (markaz/qism) or at the finer scale of village and urban district (qaria/shiyakha).The interactive web mapping platform undertaken with CAPMAS has been online since 2019: www.cedejcapmas.org. This innovative tool shares a database that is both demographic and socio-economic, and it performs geocoding of each administrative entity according to the last census in 2017. Its originality thus lies in the temporal monitoring of localities over two centuries and in the interactive dynamic mapping tool. The web portal also includes historical records of all Egyptian administrative districts (5,779 villages and urban districts in total), the evolution of the administrative division of the Egyptian territory from 1882 to the present day, and an administrative directory of localities, thus allowing diachronic comparisons over two centuries, despite administrative reshuffles. The aim of the web platform is not only to preserve and share a wealth of statistics about Egypt, but also to offer a tool for using this diversified and multi-scale corpus of Big Data with spatial reference. The platform is intended for a wide audience (researchers, decision-makers, civil society) and is therefore designed to allow direct access, extraction, exploration, processing of data corpus and analysis of geo-referenced Big Data.