  Individuals together with their locations & attributes are essential to feed
micro-level applied urban models (for example, spatial micro-simulation and
agent-based modeling) for policy evaluation. Existed studies on population
spatialization and population synthesis are generally separated. In developing
countries like China, population distribution in a fine scale, as the input for
population synthesis, is not universally available. With the open-government
initiatives in China and the emerging Web 2.0 techniques, more and more open
data are becoming achievable. In this paper, we propose an automatic process
using open data for population spatialization and synthesis. Specifically, the
road network in OpenStreetMap is used to identify and delineate parcel
geometries, while crowd-sourced POIs are gathered to infer urban parcels with a
vector cellular automata model. Housing-related online Check-in records are
then applied to distinguish residential parcels from all of the identified
urban parcels. Finally the published census data, in which the sub-district
level of attributes distribution and relationships are available, is used for
synthesizing population attributes with a previously developed tool Agenter
(Long and Shen, 2013). The results are validated with ground truth
manually-prepared dataset by planners from Beijing Institute of City Planning.
