Interfacing the SAND Spatial Browser with FedStats Data

FedStats enables ordinary citizens to access and search official statistics of numerous Federal agencies without knowing in advance which agency produced them. This is done via the internet through the world wide web. This data can be retrieved by topic, responsible agency, keywords, and press release. There is also a limited capability of retrieval of data by county or state. In particular, this is done by selecting the appropriate name from a menu or clicking on the desired area on the map. A proposal is made to use the capabilities of the SAND Spatial Browser to provide more power to users of FedStats. In addition, the issues involved in interfacing FedStats data with the SAND are discussed. Using the SAND Spatial Browser, instead of just being able to retrieve data for a particular location or a region with a predefined boundary, users can define the spatial region of interest with greater specificity. They can also make use of ranking which is the ability to retrieve data in the order of distance from other instances of the data or aggregates of data that are user-defined. The result includes the ability to perform clustering such as that provided by a Voronoi diagram.