Thursday, 3:30 PM in Rangos I.
While many government agencies shun perl and Open Source, it is alive and well at the Census Bureau. Since the mid 1990s, the Census Bureau has been using perl for a variety of every day tasks, including system administration, batch processing, and interactive web applications. For example, one of the first intranet applications, written in perl, allowed clerks across the country to print maps housed on central servers.
The Census Bureau has a one hundred year history of applying new technologies to effectively support its Constitutional mandate to count the population of the United States. Census 2000 is incorporating many new technologies developed since the 1990 Census, including web-based census forms. Although it is too early to tell if the Census 2000 Internet Form is an effective or even popular method of submitting and collecting census forms, the project itself is a successful, time-saving integration of perl and other Open Source software. The project had to address issues of user interface design, questionnaire design, data encryption, and data storage, among others.
This talk will discuss the role of perl and Open Source software in
the Census 2000 Internet Form, and other projects including the Census
2000 Initial Response Rates site, map production, and questionnaire support
centers. Lessons learned from this experiment and how they can be
applied to future censuses and other large scale data collection operations
are also addressed.
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