Interactive Access to Large Census Data Sets

Large data sets such as the 1% and 5% Public Use Microdata Samples (PUMS) from the Bureau of the Census have been difficult to manage and analyze in almost all past and contemporary computing environments. As a consequence, such data have been a signific antly underutilized national resource. A collaborative effort involving researchers at the Population Studies Center (PSC) at the University of Michigan and the Consortium for International Earth Science Information Network (CIESIN) at Saginaw, Michigan, has demonstrated the prototype of a system, Explore, that allows interactive access via the Internet to the 1980 and 1990 1% files for the United States. Users of the CIESIN facilities, who currently include a mix of researchers, scholars, analysts, pla nners, news reporters, and students, can readily generate tables from these multi-million record files in seconds. The system has recently been implemented to access the 1990 5% PUMS files on larger parallel processing systems with similar performance ac hieved. Explore represents a realization of the promise of high performance information and computing technology to minimize, if not eliminate, the cost in terms of dollars, time, and technical expertise required to work with the PUMS and similar large, complex data sets.