CEDSCI

Zach Whitman

Quick CEDSCI overview

We're an enterprise program that focuses on dissemination.

We're responsible for disseminating Census Bureau data.

We're building two product lines:

1. Data/metadata API services

{
 @context: "https://project-open-data.cio.gov/v1.1/schema/catalog.jsonld",
 @id: "https://api.census.gov/data/1999/nonemp.json",
 @type: "dcat:Catalog",
 conformsTo: "https://project-open-data.cio.gov/v1.1/schema",
 describedBy: "https://project-open-data.cio.gov/v1.1/schema/catalog.json",
 dataset: [{
	c_vintage: 1999,
	c_dataset: ["nonemp"],
	c_geographyLink: "https://api.census.gov/data/1999/nonemp/geography.json",
	c_variablesLink: "https://api.census.gov/data/1999/nonemp/variables.json",
	c_tagsLink: "https://api.census.gov/data/1999/nonemp/tags.json",
	c_examplesLink: "https://api.census.gov/data/1999/nonemp/examples.json",
	c_groupsLink: "https://api.census.gov/data/1999/nonemp/groups.json",
	c_valuesLink: "https://api.census.gov/data/1999/nonemp/values.json",
	c_documentationLink: "http://www.census.gov/developer/",
  ...,
 ]}
}
						

2. Data dissemination applications

data.census.gov and mdat are just the start

Where we began

Where we are

Where we're going

Why are we doing this?

Centralized data access

Standardized user interactions

Consolidated business logic

But the main driver is to be responsive to our users

How are we approaching this?

Minimize one-off deliveries and duplicative ETL

Drive all data via API services

Consolidate UI components

Build applications through templates

Our process

We've moving expertise upstream

That means we're no longer creating content

The pros are data consistency, assurance, interoperability, and reliability

The cons are it takes greater coordination and it's slower

Example: pseudogeos

What we've seen

What we've heard

What we've understood

We need to focus on the usability - particularly for faceted filtering

We need better exports

We need to improve search

We're hiring

We're looking for

• Backend
• Frontend
• Interaction design
• Data scientists