Thank you, Marco.

I just want to add a couple things to your amazing contributions. First, in regard to the issue of actually getting the data in the form that is required, I got this great suggestion from the people at tech support. It involves defining an object called data:

data = {"95014", "01545", "94087", "95129", "01810",...

And then turn it into entities:

ziplist = Map[Entity["ZIPCode", #] &, data]

Provided that you have a curated list where every single entry is an actual zip code, this procedure seems to work reliably. Working in this way I was able to get a map of an interesting region that you identified as well (MA) by doing this:

GeoRegionValuePlot[zipst, GeoRange -> {{41.5, 43.}, {-72., -70.}}, 
 GeoLabels -> (Tooltip[#1, ZIPCodeData[#2, "Cities"]] &)]

This results in a nice map with tooltips that looks like this:

If you export to a html file, the tooltips show up. Many thanks for taking the time to discuss these issues.

Dear Marco, Thank you very much for your valuable insights.

There are several things I'd like to comment. First, long story short, I was lucky enough to run the thing and getting no errors at all, once. Only once in the 10 or more times I've tried. I immediately saved the results, of course. If any of the higher powers is reading this too, please know that this in undoubtedly a 100% on the Wolfram servers, I'm sorry to say. I hope this issue could be improved.

I compared the one by one and the all at once options you mentioned, and in fact the all at once version ran in roughly a third of the time the one by one did:

zips1 = Timing[Interpreter["ZIPCode"] /@ {"95014", "01545", ... } gives 294.467 seconds (and a ton of errors) zips2 = Timing[Interpreter["ZIPCode"] [{"95014", "01545",...}] gives 102.366 seconds and a fair share of errors too.

After cleaning up the data I came with a list of 1177 zip codes and students (which I'm uploading for the sake of the exercise; it's not secret, indeed). After I got the zip codes list with no errors I associated it with the number of students per zip code:

zipst = Transpose[{zips, students}]

And then did this:

GeoRegionValuePlot[zipst]

And I obtained the following:

Which is great in principle, but introduces a different set of challenges, like zooming-in relevant regions to make colors actually visible. I'm playing now with different options for GeoRegionValuePlot to improve this visualization.

The data for the this problem is attached (ZipSt.xls).

Attachments:

Dear Jorge,

that does sometimes happen when one request lots of data from the servers and the internet connection is a bit flaky or the server very busy. Here are some remarks:

1. You apply the Interpreter function one by one:

   zips = Interpreter["ZIPCode"] /@ {"95014", "01545", "94087", "95129", "01810", "10471", "02067", "01720"}
   

   Instead you might want to try and run them "in one go".

    zips = Interpreter["ZIPCode"] [ {"95014", "01545", "94087", "95129", "01810", "10471", "02067", "01720"}]
   

   That is much more efficient and saves time. You should get better results, but it does not necessarily resolve your problem.

2. This is not a really good solution, but you can try to iterate the procedure. For example you can run it once like so:

   zip1 = Transpose[{#, Interpreter["ZIPCode"][#] } & @(ToString /@ Range[85001, 85055])]
   

   where I use the Range command to generate a list of zip codes. This command leads to a result like this:

Now we can iterate the procedure until there is no change:

iterativeList=NestWhileList[(Transpose[{#, Interpreter["ZIPCode"][#] } & @Select[#, (Head[#[[2]]] === Failure) &][[All, 1]]]) &, zip1, Unequal, All]

The idea is to select those that have not been interpreted correctly and do so until there is no change. The result would be this:

Join[Select[zip1, Head[#[[2]]] === Entity &], DeleteDuplicatesBy[Reverse@Flatten[iterativeList, 1], #[[1]] &]]

In my case that still contains some Failures, but we can eliminate them like this:

DeleteDulpicates[Select[Join[Select[zip1, Head[#[[2]]] === Entity &], DeleteDuplicatesBy[Reverse@Flatten[iterativeList, 1], #[[1]] &]], Head[#[[2]]] === Entity &]]

It is not quite ideal, but you get slightly better results.

1. You could also try this:

   Entity["ZIPCode", #]&/@ (ToString /@ Range[85001, 85055])
   

That is much much faster, at least in my case. Perhaps you can try it and let me know how it works.

Cheers,

Marco

PS: I assume that the list of zip codes is nothing secret. Could you post it, i.e. attach it as a csv file or so?