Making Sense of Census Data via the World Wide Web: A Case Study Using the 1997 Census of Agriculture

• Activity Number: 474
• Type: Contributed
• Date/Time: Thursday, August 7, 2003 : 10:30 AM to 12:20 PM
• Sponsor: Section on Statistical Graphics
• Author(s): Irwin Anolik*+
• Companies: U.S. Census Bureau
• Keywords: exploratory data analysis ; dynamic data display ; multivariate visualization ; interactive graphics ; summary data

Abstract

This paper discusses research conducted at the National Agricultural Statistics Service (NASS) with the intent of enabling data customers to freely and effectively access and analyze NASS data using the world wide web. We initially focus on using data from the 1997 Census of Agriculture to research and demonstrate methods of display and analysis that could give a better understanding of inherent patterns and structure in the data. We specifically wanted to provide the ability to view, analyze, and dynamically interact with summary data at the state and county level using a web browser connected to the Internet. Historically, such customers have had access to this data in tabular form only. The paper also discusses the important concepts and technologies that we considered, and documents the selection of specific solutions that we implement on the NASS web site to give data customers the abilities discussed above. We discuss our attempt to design the web site so that information of interest to the largest number of customers is the easiest to access. The principles and methods discussed in this paper can be generalized to other sources of survey and census data.