The Development of a Generalized Resource Extraction Tool for 
Aggregate Data (GRETA) at the University of Minnesota

This presentation will describe the progress of the Public Data Access
System (PDAS)  under development by the Machine Readable Data Center
(MRDC) and Social Science Research Facility (SSRF) at the University of
Minnesota.  In its final form the PDAS will be an innovative web tool for
accessing large sets of aggregate data by pulling both table structure and
cell content information from a DDI-compliant XML-tagged codebook.  The
successful completion of this project will put the MRDC in a position to
expand the amount of on-line data available to researchers, and would
position MRDC to provide specialized data from the 2000 Census.

The pilot project to be described at IASSIST uses Minnesota and limited
U.S. level data from the 1990 Census Summary Tape File 4. This information
includes population, economic, educational and housing data for 49 racial
and ethnic groups and covering standard Census geographies. The
information provides detail not found in the commonly available data from
the 1990 Census and has not been mounted on the web by other institutions.
This file is of particular interest to researchers who need to analyze the
condition of specific racial groups in small geographic areas. It has
satisfied numerous requests for data from the MRDC and we anticipate wider
use when web access is provided.

The MRDC serves two major constituencies through its dual role as the
social sciences data library in the University Libraries and Tape
Depository custom-service provider for the Minnesota State Data Center.  
The SSRF has a background in providing research support for social
sciences data users as well as technical support for on-line collections
such as the Integrated Public-Use Microdata Series (IPUMS) created by the
Historical Census Project at the University of Minnesota.

For further information, see http://www.socsci.umn.edu/PDAS.




William C. Block
25 Blegen Hall
269 19th Avenue South
Minneapolis, MN 55455
(612) 624-7091 Voice
(612) 625-4814 Fax
block@socsci.umn.edu

John T. Easton
25 Blegen Hall
269 19th Avenue South
Minneapolis, MN  55455
(612) 625-1079 Voice
(612) 625-4814 Fax
easton@socsci.umn.edu

Wendy L. Treadwell
2 Wilson Library
301 19th Avenue South
Minneapolis, MN  55455
(612) 624-4389 Voice
(612) 626-9353 Fax
wendy@mrdc.lib.umn.edu