Data USA explained

Data USA
Logo Size:128px
Author:Deloitte, MIT Media Lab – Collective Learning, Datawheel
Developer:Datawheel
Programming Language:Python, JavaScript, React
Platform:Web
Language:English
License:AGPL

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, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Collective Learning Group, and Datawheel.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

The platform won a 2017 Webby Award for Government & Civil Innovation,[6] along with a 2016 Kantar Information is Beautiful Award.[7]

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.[8] 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, 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 (OEC), DataChile, Data Africa, and Data KOREA.

Architecture

Back-end

Data USA consolidates data from 21 open data sources, cleaned and standardized into a PostgreSQL database, and accessible via a public API.[9] The ETL steps are currently written in python, and the API is constructed using mondrian-rest.

Front-end

The front-end of Data USA is written in HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, using a React framework called Canon. The codebase, much like the underlying data itself, is made open-source on GitHub 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 that enables quick visualization development by providing default styles and helper functions and classes.[10]

See also

Notes and References

  1. Web site: Media Lab's 'Data USA' aims to make government data easy to use – The Tech. Steve Lohr.
  2. Web site: MIT DATA USA Turns U.S. Data into Visual Interface – Digital Trends. Bruce Brown. 5 April 2016. Digital Trends.
  3. Web site: MIT and Deloitte's DataUSA Web Tool Makes City Data Easy to Access and Understand – CityLab. Tanvi Misra. CityLab.
  4. Web site: DataUSA Visualizes Improved Insight into Government Data. Data Informed. 2016-04-27. 2016-04-07. https://web.archive.org/web/20160407103033/http://data-informed.com/datausa-visualizes-improved-insight-into-government-data/. dead.
  5. Web site: Website Seeks to Make Government Data Easier to Sift Through. Steve Lohr. New York Times.
  6. Web site: Data USA -- The Webby Awards. en-US. 2019-09-19.
  7. Web site: Data USA. www.informationisbeautifulawards.com. 2019-09-19.
  8. Web site: Deloitte, MIT, and Datawheel Launch New 'Viz Builder' in Data USA 3.0 – Press Release Deloitte US. Deloitte United States. en. 2019-09-19. 2019-05-05. https://web.archive.org/web/20190505135631/https://www2.deloitte.com/us/en/pages/about-deloitte/articles/press-releases/deloitte-mit-datawheel-launch-viz-builder-data-usa-3-0.html. dead.
  9. Web site: Data USA. datausa.io. live. https://web.archive.org/web/20160407121724/http://datausa.io:80/about/api/ . 2016-04-07 . 2019-09-19.
  10. Web site: D3plus. d3plus.org. en. 2019-09-19.

This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Data USA".

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