CSPro, short for the Census and Survey Processing System, is a

public domain The public domain (PD) consists of all the creative work to which no Exclusive exclusive intellectual property rights apply. Those rights may have expired, been forfeited, expressly Waiver, waived, or may be inapplicable. Because no one holds ...

and

Open source Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use and view the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open source model is a decentrali ...

data collection and processing software package developed by the

U.S. Census Bureau The United States Census Bureau, 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 U.S. Census Bureau is part of the U ...

and

ICF International ICF International, Inc. is an American Public company, publicly traded consulting and technology services company based in Reston, Virginia. The company was founded in 1969, and as of 2019, had US $1.48 billion in revenue, with approximately 9,0 ...

. Serpro S.A. was involved in past development. Funding for development comes primarily from the U.S. Agency for International Development. The main purpose of this

software suite A software suite (also known as an application suite) is a collection of computer programs (application software, or programming software) of related functionality, sharing a similar user interface and the ability to easily exchange data with eac ...

is to design applications for data collection, processing and tabulation. CSPro was designed and implemented through a joint effort by the developers of two earlier software packages that were used to capture, edit, and tabulate census and survey data on DOS-based machines: the Integrated Microcomputer Processing System (IMPS), developed by the U.S. Census Bureau, and the Integrated System for Survey Analysis (ISSA), developed by Serpro S.A. As a result, CSPro is founded on more than 35 years of development. The software can be run on Windows-based OS (8,10 and 11—

Linux Linux ( ) is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an kernel (operating system), operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically package manager, pac ...

and

IOS Ios, Io or Nio (, ; ; locally Nios, Νιός) is a Greek island in the Cyclades group in the Aegean Sea. Ios is a hilly island with cliffs down to the sea on most sides. It is situated halfway between Naxos and Santorini. It is about long an ...

operating systems are not supported) to design applications able to be deployed on Android and Windows family OS following its "Build Once, Deploy Many" ability. These applications can be used for mobile

survey data collection With the application of probability sampling in the 1930s, surveys became a standard tool for empirical research in social sciences, marketing, and official statistics. The methods involved in survey data collection are any of a number of ways in ...

(via Smartphones or tablets), or for office-based collection (via laptops or desktops). The public domain distribution is

open source Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use and view the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open source model is a decentrali ...

. Support for Unicode data entry began with version 5. A CSPro designed application can be a dynamic and intelligent questionnaire for entering, editing, tabulating, mapping, and disseminating

census A census (from Latin ''censere'', 'to assess') is the procedure of systematically acquiring, recording, and calculating population information about the members of a given Statistical population, population, usually displayed in the form of stati ...

and survey data. Also, the simple IDE of the CSPro Designer can be used to implement sophisticated

Information System An information system (IS) is a formal, sociotechnical, organizational system designed to collect, process, Information Processing and Management, store, and information distribution, distribute information. From a sociotechnical perspective, info ...

in various fields such as Monitoring and Evaluation, Business Administration, Logistics and so on. This package is widely used worldwide by statistical agencies, international organizations, NGOs, consulting firms, colleges and universities, hospitals, and private sector groups, in more than 160 countries. Major international household survey programs, such as

Multiple Indicator Cluster Surveys The Multiple Indicator Cluster Surveys (MICS) are household statistical survey, surveys implemented by countries under the programme developed by the UNICEF, United Nations Children's Fund to provide internationally comparable, statistics, statistic ...

(MICS) and

Demographic and Health Surveys The Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) Program was responsible for collecting and disseminating accurate, nationally representative data on health and population in developing countries. The project is implemented by ICF International and was fun ...

(DHS) also use CSPro for Census and Survey works. While the program uses a simple graphical interface ( IDE), CSPro also contains a sophisticated programming language that can be used to create highly customized applications. Beginning users can program simple quality control checks, and advanced users can write dynamic applications using his procedural and object oriented programming language. It remains actively in development (as of Winter 2025). With latest improvements, CSPro designed application support: * SQLite and SQL language; * Relational database support on device and servers; * Improved data security through transparent data encryption and support of best in class hashing/salting algorithms; * Multiple questions per screen; * Mobile Mapping: Displaying dynamic mapping and deal with geographic informations (online maps, Tiled offline basemap and points (all features: polygon, polyline, line is supported on version 7.7)); * Introduction of Objects programming in CSPro logic; * CSS, HTML5, JavaScript via templated report, CAPI text, Webview/Webview 2 and CSPro-Javascript interface; * PHP through CSWeb; * Powerful and comprehensive paradata for complete and intelligent monitoring of the data collection step; * Smart application installation using barcode/QR Code; * Multiple programming language improvements (smart synchronization (including on local Dropbox and FTP servers,

dynamic translation Dynamic translation may refer to: *Semantic equivalence (linguistics) *Dynamic recompilation In computer science, dynamic recompilation is a feature of some emulators and virtual machines, where the system may recompile some part of a program ...

, etc.)); The source code of the CSPro software Suite: CSPro Designer, CSEntry Windows and Android, CSPro Help Documentation, CSWeb API have been released to the public. And starting 2025, CSPro become an open source project. In addition to the help system disseminated with CSPro, an active users forum is maintained as well.

References

External links

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Source RepositoriesCSPro UsersSerpro S.A.
{{Statistical software Public-domain software Free software United States Census Bureau Data processing Statistical survey software Information systems Integrated development environments

See also

References

External links