Every five years, the Economic Directorate of the Census Bureau conducts a wide-ranging census of economic activity that involves 650+ individual survey forms (each of which is approximately 10 pages long) that are sent out to 6+ million United States businesses. Because the survey forms measure current economic activity, their questions change every five-year cycle to reflect the changes in the dynamic United States economy.

Creating and managing these survey forms is a significant effort involving the combined efforts of hundreds of people over a two (2) year timeframe. Historically, these survey forms have been created using a manual process that is labor-intensive, error prone, and difficult to translate to the electronic world. The layout process involves marking up paper drafts of the surveys and sending them to another department for manual composition. It takes anywhere from several days to several weeks for each draft, depending on the workload of the manual composition department.

Census wanted to solve two business problems: first, to design a solution to more effectively manage such a large number of surveys in a short time frame; and second, to take advantage of both paper and electronic surveys from a common content engine. To achieve both of these goals, Census needed to produce a majority of the survey layouts automatically via rules and style sheets.

• Along with streamlining an approach to common survey questions, Fenestra had to take into account those survey questions that did not follow regular rules (and therefore could not have automatically generated layouts). The answer was to implement a high-end "content-aware" layout designer application which Census forms designers could use to custom-design their survey questions.
• Census could ultimately combine the custom-formatted and auto-formatted sections automatically into a complete paper or electronic survey form.
• In order to ensure the consistency and integrity of reused questions across forms by allowing both the content and layout of questions that appear on many different forms to be centrally managed, changes to a common question in one place had to immediately and automatically flow into all the different forms in which that question is used. This also vastly simplifies the process of designing the forms because of the shared information.

Fenestra created a series of tools packaged as the Generalized Instrument Design System (GIDS).

The key of Fenestra's solution is the careful differentiation between content and presentation. "Content" includes information such as the questions on the survey form, and the response fields associated with those questions. "Presentation" includes information such as the fonts, colors, and graphical style of a survey targeted to a specific media, such as paper, electronic, or web.

Fenestra has developed a flexible and extremely capable formatting language based on the Extensible Markup Language (XML) and Extensible Stylesheet Language (XSL) standards. Fenestra has written applications to actually implement this Fenestra-designed layout language for both paper-based and electronic-based surveys.

Managing the content separately from the layout also enables Fenestra-written software to produce approximately eighty percent (80%) of the survey layouts automatically via rules and style sheets. This automatic formatting process is implemented by a server application called GIDS AutoFormatter.

Fenestra has implemented a high-end "content-aware" layout designer application called GIDS Forms Designer for the twenty percent (20%) of survey questions that do not follow regular rules.

The Fenestra process combines the custom-formatted and auto-formatted sections to build a fully rendered multi-page layout in less than two seconds, thus speeding production by several orders of magnitude.

In this system, the content meta-data is stored in an Oracle database and maintained by a standard Oracle Developer client/server application. The database server provides the content information to the Fenestra software applications using Extensible Markup Language (XML) interchange files. Fenestra software then combines the content information with layout information to produce both paper and electronic layouts.

Programming diagnostics, database design & development, forms processing & recognition, imaging, OCR & KFI, security & encryption, entity/relationship data modeling, component development, Borland Delphi, Perl and JavaScript, Oracle SQL Database, object-oriented programming, object-oriented analysis & design, Unified Modeling Language (UML), XML, XSL, web-based programming, client-server programming.

This has been a large project that has resulted in a large number of deliverables:

• GIDS Survey Formatting Objects (SFO) Language: For describing paper and electronic layouts using a common XML-based meta-data driven layout language.
• GIDS Forms Description Language (FDL): For describing answer fields and behavior (including calculated fields and constraints) in electronic surveys in an XML-based meta-data driven language
• GIDS Layout Previewer: For previewing GIDS SFO layouts (particularly paper). The Previewer is available as a stand-alone Microsoft Windows application, or as a web browser plug-in that works with Netscape Navigator, Microsoft Internet Explorer, and Opera browsers.
• GIDS Surveyor: For conducting SFO/FDL electronic surveys, including content, layout, and behavioral meta-data. The Surveyor is also available as a standalone Windows application or a browser plug-in.
• GIDS AutoFormatter: For automatically building SFO layouts based on content via rules and stylesheets. The AutoFormatter is a Windows NT service that runs continuously on a Census server, and automatically generates layouts based on content XML files it receives - in seconds.
• GIDS Forms Designer: For custom-designing building SFO layouts based on content via rules.
• GIDS Forms Assembler: For assembling reusable custom- and auto-formatted sections into a complete form.
• Automated survey form layouts and data dissemination reports

The GIDS software has been deployed to hundreds of workstations at Census, and is being used to produce both paper and electronic 650+ surveys for the 2002 Economic Census. These surveys will be sent out to 6+ million businesses.

With these need systems in place, the Bureau is now able to extract, analyze and present data in a variety of forms across multiple publishing channels. We have enhanced the ability to provide quick access to accurate data that affect Congressional and Presidential policy decisions. Automation has also eased the burden of respondents.

Our contributions have helped Census:

• Trigger business events across the Economic Directorate
• Notify decision makers with timely and accurate input
• Enable applications to work in concert and to benefit from each other
• Propel transformation of legacy systems
• Improve agility and robustness of data collection, capture and sharing of information

We are proud of our positive working relationship with Census. We have accommodated the Bureau’s schedules and specifications as closely as possible, and have explained technical trade-offs and risks when emerging needs/requests have been made. When we’ve received inputs later than expected, we have diligently updated Census about how they affect our portion of the project so everyone can adjust expectations accordingly. Another key element of our project management approach has been the creation and on-going publication of a newsletter to key Census personnel, to help educate and promote the adoption of the technologies we’ve helped build for the Economic Census.

The Assistant Director for Economic Programs has sent us a Letter of Commendation about our contributions, and the GIDS/EMR project also received an Honorable Mention for the Census Director’s Award for Innovation. We hope that our award-winning research and development will continue to enhance Census’ technical quality, information management processes and business goals.

Many of these documents are in PDF format, and require the use of Adobe Acrobat Reader

• Argument: Separating Content, Presentation and Behavior Components in the Census GIDS Project
• Letter of Commendation to Fenestra
• U.S. Census' Slide Presentation about the GIDS Project
• Digitizing the U.S. Census Bureau
• Going End-to-End: Interoperable E-Business Standards Integrated with End-User and Internal Interactions
• Council of Professional Associations on Federal Statistics - Minutes of the Quarterly Meeting
• Statistical Commission and Economic Commission for Europe - Joint UNECE/EUROSTAT Work Session on Electronic Data Reporting, Conference of European Statisticians
• Performance Information for Major IT Investments, President's Budget for 2003
• International Conference on Establishment Surveys - II; Survey Methods for Businesses, Farms, and Institutions
• 14th International Roundtable on Business Survey Frames, by Ed Walker, United States Bureau of the Census