Social Explorer announced today that it will be beta testing its new Census reporting and data extraction engine in the coming weeks. The new tools have been under development for six months, and will represent a major advancement in demographic research. The tool will be available at the following url:
http://www.socialexplorer.com/pub/ReportData/home.aspx

Users have consistently requested the ability to extract census data to analyze externally in spreadsheets, databases, or statistical applications. The new data extract engine will do just this, giving users a great deal of control over the specific variables and geographic levels they want. Best of all, the new system will scale to the experience of users: demography novices will find it as easy as ever to jump right in and visually explore neighborhoods using data maps while the more experienced users will be able to extract custom datasets, and perform their own analyses.

Ahmed Lacevic, the site’s lead engineer, said: “developing the tool presented unique challenges, both in terms of designing a system that could accommodate enormous social science datasets and preparing the data for the system.” The 2000 Census consists of more than 7 million variables at over 110 geographic levels. Census 2000 Summary File 1 (SF1) and SF3 alone amount to more than 100 GB of data.

The system, once completely loaded, will contain over a terrabyte of tabbulated census data which will include historical data going back to the first census in 1790. That is enough data to fill over 2.5 million books with numbers. At the conclusion of the beta period, the new system will give all subscribed users more functionality than ever before.