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GCN Home > April 1, 2002 issue

Custom Publishing

By Patricia Daukantas, GCN Staff

Census turns to XML for forms prep

The Census Bureau’s Generalized Instrument Design System is using Extensible Markup Language to speed the layout and assembly of economic census forms that will go to millions of businesses this December.

GIDS has a central metadata repository plus four software applications that use the metadata to automate forms layout.

Every five years, the economic census collects data on 6.5 million U.S. businesses, said Larry Blum, assistant division chief for collection activities in the bureau’s Economic Planning and Coordination Division in Suitland, Md. Commerce Department analysts use the results to compute the gross domestic product and other measures of U.S. economic health.

About 1.5 million of the companies are small enough that the Census Bureau gets all the data it needs about them from IRS payroll and income tax files, Blum said.

Most of the rest do business in only one location, so they fill out a single set of economic census forms. The questions answered by these single-establishment businesses depend on their categories under the North American Industrial Classification System.

Custom forms

The bureau makes up different forms for each NAICS category so that businesses needn’t wade through a single gigantic form full of inapplicable questions, said Steven A. Schafer, chief technology officer of Fenestra Technologies Corp. of Germantown, Md. Fenestra developed GIDS for the bureau.

Large companies that do business in multiple locations fill out one set of census forms per location, Blum said. With paper forms running six to 20 pages each, some big corporations must answer hundreds or thousands of pages of questions.

The forms are “sometimes delivered on pallets,” said Rick Rogers, Fenestra’s chief executive officer. Without GIDS, Census workers never would have been able to design electronic and paper forms for each of the 650 NAICS categories, Blum said.

Laying out each form with a graphics design package produces good-looking questionnaires, but it’s time-consuming and tedious, said Dennis Wagner, special assistant in the Census Bureau’s economic planning division and GIDS team leader.

So Fenestra created a forms designer application for layout, an autoformat application to assemble the pages into forms, a preview tool and a surveyor tool to display electronic versions of the forms and collect responses.

Although the 650 forms are tailored to different industries, many questions do apply to multiple forms, Wagner said. GIDS automates the layout of more than 90 percent of the pages. The XML metadata attached to each question in the repository controls the typography and placement of questions on each page.