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 is a multinational professional services network based in London, United Kingdom. It is the largest professional services network in the world by revenue and number of employees, and is one of the Big Four accounting firms, along wi ...

, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Collective Learning Group, and Datawheel. The platform won a 2017

Webby Award The Webby Awards (colloquially referred to as the Webbys) are awards for excellence on the Internet presented annually by the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences, a judging body composed of over three thousand industry experts a ...

for Government & Civil Innovation, along with a 2016

Kantar A kantar is the official Egyptian weight unit for measuring cotton. It corresponds to the US hundredweight, and is roughly equal to 99.05 pounds, or 45.02 kilogram The kilogram (also spelled kilogramme) is the base unit of mass in the Inte ...

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 is a tenured professor of social and behavioral sciences at the Toulouse School of Economics and director of thCenter ...

, 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 an online data visualization and distribution platform for international trade data designed and owned bDatawheel Through interactive visualizations, the OEC aims to make global trade data accessib ...

(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 PostgreSQL ( ) also known as Postgres, is a free and open-source software, free and open-source relational database management system (RDBMS) emphasizing extensibility and SQL compliance. PostgreSQL features transaction processing, transactions ...

database, and accessible via a public

API An application programming interface (API) is a connection between computers or between computer programs. It is a type of software interface, offering a service to other pieces of software. A document or standard that describes how to build ...

. 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 (prog ...

, and the API is constructed using mondrian-rest.

Front-end

The front-end of Data USA is written in

HTML Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) is the standard markup language for documents designed to be displayed in a web browser. It defines the content and structure of web content. It is often assisted by technologies such as Cascading Style Sheets ( ...

, CSS, and

JavaScript JavaScript (), often abbreviated as JS, is a programming language and core technology of the World Wide Web, alongside HTML and CSS. Ninety-nine percent of websites use JavaScript on the client side for webpage behavior. Web browsers have ...

, using a

React REACT or React may refer to: Computing * React (software), a JavaScript library for building user interfaces from Facebook Inc (now Meta Platforms) ** React Native, a mobile application framework created by Facebook Inc (now Meta Platforms) * React ...

framework called Canon. The codebase, much like the underlying data itself, is made open-source on

GitHub GitHub () is a Proprietary software, proprietary developer platform that allows developers to create, store, manage, and share their code. It uses Git to provide distributed version control and GitHub itself provides access control, bug trackin ...

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) stan ...

that enables quick visualization development by providing default styles and helper functions and classes.

References

Internet in the United States PostgreSQL Datasets Federal government of the United States {{Library-stub

Architecture

Back-end

Front-end

See also

References