  The purpose of this paper is to describe the development of a synthetic
population dataset that is open and realistic and can be used to facilitate
understanding the cartographic process and contextualizing the cartographic
artifacts. We first discuss an optimization model that is designed to construct
the synthetic population by minimizing the difference between the summarized
information of the synthetic populations and the statistics published in census
data tables. We then illustrate how the synthetic population dataset can be
used to contextualize maps made using privacy-preserving census data. Two
counties in Ohio are used as case studies.
