Information You Can Use
DataPlace.Org; One-Stop Housing and Demographics Data Engine
Need to know your area’s average income? Wondering what the population breakdown is in a certain location? Maybe you want to know about the statistics of mortgage lending before you buy a house.
The housing and community resource KnowledgePlex has developed a sister website with data fit for researchers but still accessible to the average person. The beauty of the data engine, DataPlace.org, is its approachable wealth of housing and demographic data from a variety of recognized sources, including the U.S. Census reports from 1990 and 2000. The site’s ability to offer data in a visualized format makes it easier to access and interpret the information and the site provides users a list of data sources, explanations of the perimeters of each source and lists of years and geographic levels for each one.
The DataPlace engine organizes information with clear instructions on how to utilize each of the website’s features, how to customize views and an explanation of each feature’s representation of data. The interface provides users accessibility to a large quantity of statistics and allows them to inspect locations of varying scope with the option to compare one location against another. These degrees of detail and personalization make Dataplace a useful tool for non-specialists and specialists alike. As opposed to its mother organization, KnowledgePlex, which is known for its appeal to the general public for housing concerns, DataPlace has presented itself as a more research oriented tool in housing and community development. The engine serves audiences such as policy makers, practitioners, scholars and researchers, and new media professionals.
The initial function of the site lets users search and view data for different locations, varying from the scale of a neighborhood through to a national level. An auto-completion search box of locations makes it possible to enter an area from any page on the site and call up its profile. Each location’s profile has four tabs:
- social /demographic
- income/employment
- housing, mortgage lending
- federal expenditures
Once under a particular tab, users can scroll over icons to maximize graphs and charts, rank the location’s statistics on a state or national level, and enlarge the region’s map with one click. DataPlace also provides the option to customize viewing preferences for future searches. The site’s technology enables access to several representations of the same data, such as barcharts, scatterplots and color-themed maps with multiple indicators, multiple years or multiple geographic entities. The amount of information could be considerably confusing but DataPlace makes retrieval and interpretation feasible.
Registered users of DataPlace are encouraged to save their own work, participate in creating and communicating in topical groups, and take advantage of the ability to publish results or works in progress within the groups.
A breakdown of some of the site’s major features that make this possible include:
Interactive Maps - Users can customize a map's appearance by selecting different color schemes or interval ranges for their themes and save the results to a PDF file.
Area Profiles and Rankings - Tabular profiles bring together a pre-selected group of indicators that provide an overview of demographic and social, employment and income, housing, or mortgage lending conditions in the area of interest. The indicators can then be ranked on local, state and national levels.
Charts and Tables - Chart and Table Builder is a simple tool that allows users to prepare bar and line charts with indicators of their choice. DataPlace then automatically generates a data table that goes along with the chart.
Housing Data News – Users can look to this section of DataPlace for the latest information on newly released data sets, as well as highlights from relevant reports and research. The KnowledgePlex® Calendar shows dates of key upcoming housing data releases.
External Resources on the web - DataPlace provides short descriptions of and links to more than 100 sources of housing, demographic, and economic data in the "Web Data Links" section. These resources cover data sets used on the DataPlace website and other information found on the web.
A few other features that make DataPlace approachable and informative are links to available data, a glossary, dataset guides, a how-to on citing DataPlace and Quick Help Guides. Another aspect of Dataplace is that it is still in development, which means the site will hopefully move forward and expand to suit even more users needs.
Some of the plans to improve and expand the site for the future area already under way, These goals include:
•Expansion of the site to deal with topics such as business establishments from the Census Bureau's ZIP Business Patterns database and Low-Income Housing Tax Credit developments from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.
•Future enhancements that will allow users to define their own market area by selecting groups of census tracts, counties, or states and upload their data for mapping in conjunction with data already provided on DataPlace.
•Handy how-to guides that provide in-depth descriptions of selected data sets. These guides will show non-experts how they can analyze and apply the site's data to explore real-world housing and community development issues.
For More Information about the sites, their missions and their capabilities visit or read:
“DataPlace: Exploring Statistics about Cities.” Karen Theisen and Nancy Frishberg, Ph. D. http://www.andrew.cmu.edu/user/cdisalvo/chi2007workshop/papers/DataPlace-workshopCHi2007-3.pd
Written by Michele Rodgers