Data USA

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]

Data USA
Original author(s)Deloitte, MIT Media Lab – Collective Learning, Datawheel
Developer(s)Datawheel
Initial releaseApril 4, 2016 (2016-04-04)
Written inPython, JavaScript, React
PlatformWeb
Available inEnglish
LicenseAffero GPL
Websitedatausa.io

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.[10]

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.[11] 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.[12]

See also

References
  1. Steve Lohr. "Media Lab's 'Data USA' aims to make government data easy to use – The Tech".
  2. Bruce Brown (5 April 2016). "MIT DATA USA Turns U.S. Data into Visual Interface – Digital Trends". Digital Trends.
  3. Tanvi Misra. "MIT and Deloitte's DataUSA Web Tool Makes City Data Easy to Access and Understand – CityLab". CityLab.
  4. "DataUSA Visualizes Improved Insight into Government Data". Data Informed.
  5. Steve Lohr. "Website Seeks to Make Government Data Easier to Sift Through". New York Times.
  6. "Data USA -- The Webby Awards". Retrieved 2019-09-19.
  7. "Data USA". www.informationisbeautifulawards.com. Retrieved 2019-09-19.
  8. "Deloitte, MIT, and Datawheel Launch New 'Viz Builder' in Data USA 3.0 – Press Release | Deloitte US". Deloitte United States. Retrieved 2019-09-19.
  9. "Data USA". datausa.io. Archived from the original on 2016-04-07. Retrieved 2019-09-19.
  10. Aristarán, Manuel (2019-09-06), GitHub - jazzido/mondrian-rest: A REST interface for Mondrian ROLAP server., retrieved 2019-09-19
  11. The most comprehensive visualization of U.S. public data —: DataUSA/datausa-site, DataUSA, 2019-08-07, retrieved 2019-09-19
  12. "D3plus". d3plus.org. Retrieved 2019-09-19.


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