NLT at Cencus

Introduction

NLT provides project management, systems design and development, and technical support services to the U.S. Census Bureau’s Center for Economic Studies and DataWeb Applications branches. Working under subcontract to Abt Associates, NLT acts as team lead for several major development efforts, including OnTheMap, OnTheMap for Emergency Management, and the Geo-coded Address List.

OnTheMap Application

NLT is working on one of the largest, most complex geospatial related deployments of data for the U.S. Census Bureau- the OnTheMap application. NLT is providing project management, data development, application design, deployment, testing, and training services.

Part of the Longitudinal Employer-Household Dynamics program at Census, OnTheMap is an innovative longitudinal workforce data Web mapping and reporting application. It provides unprecedented geographic, historical, analytical, and data visualization capability for identifying where workers are employed and live, along with indicators such as age, earnings, and industry distributions. The application, designed as a multi-dimensional information system, provides a unique Web-based interface with analytical tools for querying and visualizing labor economic and workforce indicators by geography and over time, permitting users to better understand trends in employment, commuting, etc.

Check out “Where Are the Workers? Data Sharing Expands Federal Geospatial Analytic Offering,” in the November 2011 issue of GeoWorld magazine.

Check out “Where Are the Workers? Data Sharing Expands Federal Geospatial Analytic Offering,” in the November 2011 issue of GeoWorld magazine.

OnTheMap for Emergency Management

NLT is also providing project management, data development, application design, deployment, testing, and training services for OnTheMap for Emergency Management.

OnTheMap for Emergency Management is a public data tool that provides unique detail on the workforce, for U.S. areas affected by hurricanes, floods, and wildfires, in real time. The web-based tool provides an intuitive interface for viewing the location and extent of current and forecasted emergency events on a map, and allows users to easily retrieve detailed reports containing labor market characteristics for these areas. The reports provide the number and location of jobs, industry type, worker age and earnings. Worker race, ethnicity, and educational attainment levels are under a beta release at this time.

To provide users with the latest information available, OnTheMap for Emergency Management automatically incorporates real time data updates from the National Weather Service, Departments of Interior and Agriculture, and other agencies for hurricanes, floods, and wildfires.

Recent enhancements include:

Real Time Updates for Hurricanes, Floods and Wildfires
Expanded Hurricane Detail (Forecast Area, Current Wind Radii, Wind History)
Expanded Reports with New Beta Data on Demographic Characteristics (Race, Ethnicity, Educational Attainment)
Improved User Interface with New Map, Navigation, and Search Tools Map
Animation & Timeline for Viewing Daily Event Histories

TheDataWeb Mapping Gateway Redesign and Development

Since 2008, NLT has provided the U.S. Census Bureau’s innovative DataWeb and Applications Branch with Geospatial application and database design, development, and implementation services. The DataWeb is an open-source data-networking framework of online demographic, economic, environmental, health, and other data libraries housed in disparate organizations and systems through a collection of state-of-the-art services-oriented systems and software. The DataWeb provides data query, extraction, analysis, mapping, and visualization tools for both the desktop (DataFerrett) and the Web (HotReport). See the Community Economic Development HotReport.

New Light Technologies developed and integrated a new Javascript-based Google Maps service into the DataWeb system architecture, improving the look-and-feel and readability of maps and geographic data and providing a plug-and-play mapping service that is highly scalable, more interoperable, and faster.

Geo-coded Address List Redesign & Implementation

Since 2009, NLT has been engaged in leading the redesign of LEHD’s Geo-coded Address List (GAL), the central module within the production infrastructure which geo-codes business establishments and workers across the U.S. on a quarterly basis in the production of Quarterly Workforce Indicators. The data produced is a longitudinal national frame of jobs, designed to cover the employment history and characteristics of up to 150 million current workers, the payroll history and characteristics of more than 20 million current employers, and their relationship through jobs.

NLT is redesigning this system to track and report the historical temporal nature of people's work and residence locations while being capable of reporting various properties about addresses including: source data hygiene, location certainty, maximum certain precision (i.e. 80% confidence), alternate locations, address life-cycle (beginning and ending dates), the profile of lists that the address appears in, and the exact path in the decision tree used when providing a location for any address.

The system is being designed to have 3 principal enhancements to improve address geocoding. The new system will track the longitudinal history of the locations of establishments and their addresses and use additional data sources, not currently used, when building the longitudinal history to minimize missing observations and missing variables. Additionally the new system will detect common address hygiene issues and take appropriate corrective steps and use appropriate data strategies to minimize detrimental effects. The enhancements will provide major improvements to the quality and consistency of data outputs as well as a new a robust enterprise application environment with greatly improved interoperability, scalability, and performance capable of geo-coding roughly 1 million records per hour.