Lisa Nyman, US Census Bureau
Rachael LaPorte Taylor, Fedstats.gov
Track: Perl
Date: Friday, July 26
Time: 2:30pm - 3:15pm
Location: Grande Ballroom A
MapStats, part of the FedStats.gov gateway to statistics about the United States, is an innovative data access tool used to present statistical data to a general audience. MapStats offers easy, quick and intuitive access to statistical data gathered by the US Federal Government. Statistics are presented at the federal, state, and county levels. MapStats provides an easy-to-navigate interface to this data using pull down menus and reference maps, and offers mandatory Section 508 accessibility features.
Like the rest of FedStats.gov, MapStats was built with a reliance on Open Source tools, such as Perl, Apache and MySQL. MapStats complements its use of more traditional statistical tables with simple thematic maps. These maps are geovisualization tools that aid the analysis and discovery of statistical trends.
This talk is a case study of the MapStats project, with specific focus on the addition of thematic maps. Simple open source tools became a desktop mapping system, in a short time creating thematic maps to enhance MapStats' traditional statistical tables.
