NTIA Unveils Portal To Ease Access to Census Data on Computer, Internet Usage
NTIA introduced a portal to make computer and Internet usage data readily available -- "an easy-to-use source for locating statistics and charting trends," an NTIA release said. NTIA Data Central is intended to speed dissemination and facilitate analysis of U.S.…
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computer and Internet usage data periodically gathered by the Census Bureau on behalf of the Department of Commerce agency, said John Morris, associate administrator of NTIA’s Office of Policy Analysis and Development, on a Thursday press call. He said current data from the last survey show, for instance, that the number of Americans using a mobile phone to go online rose from 27.3 percent in July 2011 to 45.1 percent in July 2013. “We all intuitively know that just walking down the street,” but it’s useful to quantify, he said. NTIA has been publishing reports on the data, which come from Census Bureau surveys of 50,000 people and have been collected since 1994, Morris said, but the new portal will allow the agency to make the data available faster and in ways that are more user-friendly. He said he believes NTIA will receive the raw data from a July 2015 survey by year-end and it will try “mightily” to get the data on the website as soon as possible thereafter. NTIA expects to accelerate the data releases by about a year compared with the previous process, he said. Rafi Goldberg, an NTIA policy analyst, said the website provides data and analysis in different forms to accommodate the needs of different people: casual users, people who want to survey and break down data quickly, and serious researchers who want to plow through voluminous underlying data. The site features a Digital Nation Blog that will include periodic analysis, a Data Explorer page for quick looks at usage trends in chart form, and a Research Center with detailed data sets for deeper dives. Data Explorer allows users to chart granular trends by slicing and dicing data in many different ways through pulldown tabs, without having to manipulate the raw data themselves, Goldberg said. Mark Cooper, Consumer Federation of America research director, was impressed with the Data Explorer function at first glance. “This is really cool,” he told us. “The test will be, can you think of five interesting questions that you can answer in a couple minutes,” he said.