Sources

Humanity is built from published official statistics, academic survey research and open geographic data, from more than a hundred publishers. Nothing in it comes from data about identifiable people: no customer records, no tracking of devices or accounts, no profiles bought or scraped.

Below is who publishes what we use, grouped by the question each kind of source helps answer. The names are examples, not the whole list.

Who lives where

How many people, of what age and sex, in which households, in every region and square kilometre.

  • National statistical offices of every built country. Among them Statistics Sweden, INSEE in France, the statistical offices of the German Länder, Statistics Netherlands, ISTAT in Italy, and for the United Kingdom the Office for National Statistics, National Records of Scotland and NISRA.
  • Eurostat, including the European population grid from the 2021 census round.

How people live

Work, education, income, spending, housing, health, and the money a household has to live on.

  • Eurostat, for labour, income and living conditions, household budgets, health and digital life, comparable across countries.
  • National statistical offices, where they publish more detail than the European series.
  • The European Central Bank and the OECD, for interest rates, exchange rates, household wealth and tax.
  • EXIOBASE, the multi-regional environmental accounts, for the carbon footprint of what households buy.

What people think and value

Trust, wellbeing, values, priorities and media habits, and how they go together with age, income and education.

  • The European Social Survey, an academic survey programme run across Europe since 2002.

The place

Distance, land use, terrain, buildings, shops and services around every square kilometre.

  • Copernicus, the European Union's Earth observation programme, for land cover and terrain.
  • OpenStreetMap and Overture Maps, for streets, buildings and points of interest.
  • National statistics and mapping agencies, for boundaries, and geoBoundaries where a national layer is not openly available.

Cultural identity

Religion, origin and community life come from national censuses where a country publishes them, and otherwise from our own synthesis of published research. Where there is no evidence for a country the attribute comes back empty and flagged, never defaulted to the majority.

What we test against

A check only counts if the model never saw the answer. So some published figures are kept out of the build and used only to test it: small-area statistics from national offices, and Eurobarometer, the European Commission's public opinion survey, for attitudes. What the tests cover is on Validation.

On what terms

We use a source only on terms that allow a commercial product. Where a publisher's open licence does not, we ask, and use it with their written permission or not at all. Survey answers from individual respondents never leave the build: what you query is the synthetic population, never a source's own records.

Detail on request

Which table does which job, and the edition each release was built against, is shared under agreement for procurement, due diligence and audits. Write to hello@hiasynth.co and say what the review needs to cover.

If you are checking one number, send the query and we will tell you where that figure comes from.

Notices

Credit owed to the publishers whose data Hiasynth uses, in the form they ask for.

Eurostat. Source: Eurostat. Includes data from the European population grid, 2021 census round, produced by Eurostat and the national statistical offices.

National statistical offices. Contains statistics from the national statistical offices of each built country, reused under their open data terms. Figures have been combined, modelled and adjusted by Hiasynth, and the offices are not responsible for the result.

European Social Survey. Hiasynth is independent of ESS ERIC: we are neither affiliated with, endorsed by nor authorised by them, and nothing here represents their view. ESS data are freely available from the ESS data portal.

European Social Survey European Research Infrastructure (ESS ERIC) (2025)
ESS11 - integrated file, edition 4.1 [Data set]. Sikt - Norwegian Agency for
Shared Services in Education and Research. https://doi.org/10.21338/ess11e04_1

European Central Bank. Source: European Central Bank.

EXIOBASE. Emission factors derived from EXIOBASE v3.10.1, used under licence from the EXIOBASE Consortium.

Copernicus. © European Union, Copernicus Land Monitoring Service 2018, European Environment Agency (EEA). Terrain produced using Copernicus WorldDEM-30 data, © DLR e.V. 2010-2014 and © Airbus Defence and Space GmbH 2014-2018, provided under COPERNICUS by the European Union and ESA; all rights reserved.

OpenStreetMap and Overture Maps. Contains information from OpenStreetMap, made available under the Open Database License (ODbL), © OpenStreetMap contributors, and from Overture Maps, © Overture Maps Foundation.

geoBoundaries. Source: geoBoundaries (geoboundaries.org), CC BY 4.0.

Eurobarometer. Source: European Commission, Eurobarometer, published under CC BY 4.0.

Citing Hiasynth

If you publish analysis derived from Hiasynth, cite Hiasynth and the version of Humanity you queried. Every version and its release date is on the Humanity lineage.

Hiasynth, Humanity v2.2. https://hiasynth.co/humanity/2.2

Where a publication reproduces figures deriving substantially from one upstream source, cite that source too. Ask and we will tell you which apply to a given query.

Corrections

If a figure looks wrong, send the query and the result to hello@hiasynth.co. Confirmed errors are fixed in the next release and noted in its entry.