CAMBRIDGE, Mass.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Endeca Technologies, Inc., a search and business intelligence (BI) company, today announced the launch of the US Census Bureau’s new American FactFinder application built on Endeca Latitude®. The largest search application of its kind, American FactFinder makes more than 250 billion decennial census facts available and navigable to the average American, civil servants and skilled statisticians alike. To begin using the American FactFinder application, visit: http://factfinder.census.gov/.
Established in 2001, American FactFinder is an e-government website that gives Americans access to the Census data. The 2010 Decennial Census gathered 10 answers from 300 million people, resulting in more than three billion fine-grained raw facts. The Census Bureau aggregates this highly confidential raw data into reports, carefully designed by skilled statisticians to support demographic research while safeguarding citizen privacy. This massive report database contains more than 250 billion facts related to the 2010 census.
The vexing challenge of this sophisticated information product is information access. On the preceding 2001 generation of American FactFinder, expert researchers could find reports, but everyday civil servants and regular citizens often struggled to answer the demographic questions to support their programs and research.
The Bureau challenged itself to revamp the site to provide easier access to Census Data for non-expert users without sacrificing detail for the experts. This required a solution that could address extreme data volumes as well as the privacy requirements dictated by the US Constitution.
The new American FactFinder, built on Endeca Latitude, simplifies access to census information by guiding users to the data without requiring them to become experts. This approach reaches out to meet the needs of diverse users and research styles. Leveraging Endeca’s out-of-the-box functionality, American FactFinder lets users navigate with ease the Census Bureau’s large volume of detailed classifications and coding schemes, a massive search space of more than one quadrillion potential combinations.
Endeca’s Guided Navigation® and Text Search functionality allow users to search for Products (tables) and Parameters (Geographies, Population Groups, and Industry Codes) with multiple selections from a controlled taxonomy and text searches. Searches are iterative and provide immediate feedback. This guides users in understanding what information is available and how to access it, important when trying to find a specific geographic entity from a list of 14 million.
The new American FactFinder reflects the diversity of the audience it serves by guiding people to the information they want, without forcing them down any particular path or towards any set report. Loaded with the most comprehensive set of Census Data in history, the site will improve the turnaround time, efficiency, and flexibility of the Bureau’s dissemination operations.
Census data plays a critical role not only in the re-apportionment of Congressional seats, but also for state and local governments in the distribution of grant money and other federal program monies, and by research universities reviewing public policy problems. While many skilled statisticians depend of the Census Bureau’s reports for their work, many more civil servants and casual researchers need Census data to find answers to their questions to do their jobs effectively.
“The Census Bureau is responsible for providing access to one of the world’s largest data warehouses,” said Jeff Murphy, SVP and General Manager for Endeca Public Sector. “The new site represents a radical breakthrough in information access and demonstrates how Endeca can render vast quantities and varieties of data manageable and searchable.”
About Endeca
Endeca is a search and business intelligence software company that improves daily decisions for employees and purchase decisions for customers. Endeca’s unique innovation, the hybrid search-analytical database, enables IT organizations to deliver solutions with consumer ease-of-use on diverse and changing information. Endeca solutions drive hundreds of millions of dollars in reduced costs and increased revenues in the world’s most demanding decision-making environments in organizations like Boeing, Cox Newspapers, the United States Department of Justice, Ford Motor Company, Hyatt, IBM, the Library of Congress, Texas Instruments, and Walmart.com.
Headquartered in Cambridge, Mass., Endeca has operations in North America, Europe, and Asia.
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