Data USA is a free platform that allows users to collect, analyze, and visualize shared U.S. government data. Launched on April 4, 2016, Data USA is the product of an ongoing partnership between
Deloitte
Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu Limited (), commonly referred to as Deloitte, is an international professional services network headquartered in London, England. Deloitte is the largest professional services network by revenue and number of profession ...
,
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Collective Learning Group, an
Datawheel
The platform won a 2017
Webby Award for Government & Civil Innovation, along with a 2016
Kantar
A kantar is the official Egyptian weight unit for measuring cotton
Cotton is a soft, fluffy staple fiber that grows in a boll, or protective case, around the seeds of the cotton plants of the genus '' Gossypium'' in the mallow family Ma ...
Information is Beautiful Award.
On May 1, 2019, version 3.0 of the platform was released, which included a new "Viz Builder" tool, which allows users to build custom data visualizations using data from all of the data sources included on the site. This allows for cross-dimensional queries of the data, which were previously unavailable given the vertical-nature of the profile pages.
Data USA belongs to a larger family of data visualization and distribution platforms, created under the vision of
César Hidalgo
César A. Hidalgo (born December 22, 1979) is a Chilean born, Chilean- Spanish-American physicist, author, and entrepreneur. He directs thCenter for Collective Learningat the Artificial and Natural Intelligence Institute (ANITI) of the Universi ...
, which take open data sources that are traditionally siloed and collates them into a single data portal with narrative profiles and data exploration tools. These sites include:
The Observatory of Economic Complexity
The Observatory of Economic Complexity (OEC) is a data visualization site for international trade data created by the Macro Connections group at the MIT Media Lab. The goal of the observatory is to distribute international trade data in a visual ...
(OEC)
DataChileData Africa
an
Data KOREA
Architecture
Back-end
Data USA consolidates data from 21 open data sources, cleaned and standardized into a PostgreSQL
PostgreSQL (, ), also known as Postgres, is a free and open-source relational database management system (RDBMS) emphasizing extensibility and SQL compliance. It was originally named POSTGRES, referring to its origins as a successor to the In ...
database, and accessible via a public API
An application programming interface (API) is a way for two or more computer programs to communicate with each other. It is a type of software Interface (computing), interface, offering a service to other pieces of software. A document or standa ...
. The ETL steps are currently written in python
Python may refer to:
Snakes
* Pythonidae, a family of nonvenomous snakes found in Africa, Asia, and Australia
** ''Python'' (genus), a genus of Pythonidae found in Africa and Asia
* Python (mythology), a mythical serpent
Computing
* Python (pro ...
, and the API is constructed using mondrian-rest.
Front-end
The front-end of Data USA is written in HTML
The HyperText Markup Language or HTML is the standard markup language for documents designed to be displayed in a web browser. It can be assisted by technologies such as Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and scripting languages such as JavaScri ...
, CSS
Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is a style sheet language used for describing the presentation of a document written in a markup language such as HTML or XML (including XML dialects such as SVG, MathML or XHTML). CSS is a cornerstone techno ...
, and JavaScript
JavaScript (), often abbreviated as JS, is a programming language that is one of the core technologies of the World Wide Web, alongside HTML and CSS. As of 2022, 98% of Website, websites use JavaScript on the Client (computing), client side ...
, using a React REACT or React may refer to:
Science and technology
*REACT (telescope), a telescope at Fenton Hill Observatory, New Mexico, US
Computing
* React (JavaScript library) , a JavaScript library for building user interfaces, from Facebook
** React Nati ...
framework called Canon. The codebase, much like the underlying data itself, is made open-source on GitHub
GitHub, Inc. () is an Internet hosting service for software development and version control using Git. It provides the distributed version control of Git plus access control, bug tracking, software feature requests, task management, continuous ...
under a GNU Affero General Public License v3.0. The visualizations found on Data USA are created using D3plus, a library built on top of D3.js
D3.js (also known as D3, short for Data-Driven Documents) is a JavaScript library for producing dynamic, interactive data visualizations in web browsers. It makes use of Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG), HTML5, and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) sta ...
that enables quick visualization development by providing default styles and helper functions and classes.
See also
* USAFacts.org
* United States Census Bureau
The United States Census Bureau (USCB), officially the Bureau of the Census, is a principal agency of the U.S. Federal Statistical System, responsible for producing data about the American people and economy. The Census Bureau is part of the ...
References
Internet in the United States
PostgreSQL
Datasets
Federal government of the United States
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