Exploring the Commerce Data Lake

Interested in exploring the U.S. Department of Commerce's vast data lake, including tens of thousands of datasets ranging from satellite imagery to material standards to demographic surveys? Want to showcase your data visualization talents? Have a novel insight on the American experience? Passionate for the public good? Then the U.S. Department of Commerce is interested in working with you!

The Commerce Department is launching the Commerce Usability Project (https://www.commerce.gov/datausability/). It’s an effort towards making the knowledge required to use government data more open. They aim to provide enough insight, familiarity, and code to enable users to do amazing things with free data. That’s why they are putting out an open call to academia, industry and government to collaborate, demonstrate, and improve their data assets. The Department of Commerce wants to recognize YOUR expertise and contributions to their public data assets!

Agenda:

6:00PM - 6:30PM Food and networking

6:30PM - 6:40PM Introductions

6:40PM - 7:30PM Speaker presentation

7:30PM - 8:00PM Audience Q & A

8:00PM - Data drinks

Star Ying, Data Scientist

@star_is_here (https://twitter.com/star_is_here?lang=en)

http://photos1.meetupstatic.com/photos/event/5/e/2/4/600_447144100.jpeg

Star Ying is a Data Scientist with the Commerce Data Service, promoting and innovating new data products across the Department of Commerce. Previously, he served as a Mathematical Statistician in the U.S. Census Bureau, working with the Decennial Census operation, the American Community Survey, Reimbursable Demographic Surveys, and Economic Indicator Surveys.

Self-Starters

Interested in getting started? Here are some examples that have already been developed:

• NOAA’s Severe Weather Data Inventory Tutorial (http://commercedataservice.github.io/tutorial_noaa_hail/)

• NIST’s National Vulnerability Database Tutorial (http://commercedataservice.github.io/tutorial_nist_nvd/)

• US Census Bureau’s American Community Survey Tutorial (http://commercedataservice.github.io/tutorial_acs_rank/)

• NOAA’s Visible Infrared Radiometer Suite Tutorial (http://commercedataservice.github.io/tutorial_viirs_part1/)

Conditions

• All data used and code developed must be open and free.

• Individuals/groups are encouraged to use commerce data combined with other publicly available data.

• Commerce Data can be found on DOC Data Portal (http://www.data.commerce.gov/).

• The Commerce Department Data Science team is also putting together a masterlist (https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1fK0TB1GaWJyv3eOd53dOzBuk3rYpCpsRWpoz3rwouKo/edit?usp=sharing.). They are adding more datasets to this base list with some ideas of what can be done with them.

• Each submission must have at least 2 visualizations.

• At least one of the visualizations should be interactive

• Code can be embedded in HTML

• Contributions may be made by individuals as well as teams

Guidance is available from the Department of Commerce Data Science Team: Jeff Chen, Chief Data Scientist, US Department of Commerce; Star Ying, Data Scientist, US Department of Commerce; datausability@doc.gov