Designing Data Collection, Processing, and Dissemination 

Instruments With Reusable Metadata for the U.S. Census 

Bureau’s 2002 Economic Census Initiative, Using XML and 

Web Services 

Steven A. Schafer and Roy S. Rogers, IV 

Fenestra Technologies Corporation, 20410 Century Blvd. Ste. 230, Germantown, MD 20874 

Abstract 

Fenestra Technologies Corporation recently completed a three-year project in conjunction with the United States 

Census Bureau. The goal of the project was to create software for semi-automated generation of both paper and 

electronic survey forms for use in the 2002 Economic Census. The result was a multi-component software 

package, the Generalized Instrument Design System (GIDS). GIDS is a metadata-driven and XML-based tool 

for the efficient creation of survey forms. This paper focuses on the XML-related aspects of GIDS, relates our 

positive and negative experiences in that regard, and discusses the future direction that we have planned for 

GIDS as it evolves into a more broadly-scoped information management tool. 

I. Introduction 

Every five years, the Economic Directorate of the United States Census Bureau, a division of the U.S. 

Department of Commerce, conducts a wide-ranging census of economic activity that involves over 650 

individual survey forms averaging 10–12 pages each (see http://www.census.gov/epcd/www/econ2002.html). 

These surveys are distributed to over 5 million U.S. businesses. The survey forms measure current economic 

activity, and so the specific questions vary from one census cycle to the next to reflect the changes in the U.S. 

economy. Consequently, the forms must be redesigned for each census. 

Creating and managing these survey forms is a significant undertaking, involving the combined efforts of 

hundreds of people over a two- to three-year timeframe. Historically, the survey forms have been created 

individually by hand. Obviously, this process is labor-intensive, error-prone, and difficult to translate to the 

electronic world of online surveys. The subject matter experts who create the survey questions and design the 

forms mark up paper drafts of the form layouts and send them to a separate department where graphic artists 

use conventional graphics drawing software to compose the forms. The turnaround time for a single iteration of 

the layout/edit cycle is anywhere from several days to several weeks. 

For the 2002 Economic Census, the Census Bureau contracted with Fenestra to design and implement solutions 

to two separate problems. First, it wanted to streamline the process of survey design and production so that 

subject matter experts would have essentially real-time feedback as they design and edit their form layouts. 

Second, it wanted to drive the creation of both paper and electronic (online) surveys from a single, common data 

repository containing the content and layout information for the survey forms. 

The end result of Fenestra’s work with the Census Bureau is the Generalized Instrument Design System (GIDS). 

A block diagram of GIDS is shown in Figure 1. 

GIDS consists of several modules: 

• Forms Designer – The Forms Designer is used by the subject matter experts to lay out “custom-formatted” 

sections of forms; these are sections that are not amenable to fully automated layout. 

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• Autoformatter – The Autoformatter automatically lays out regular, repeating sections of forms, based on a 

set of layout rules and templates. 

Figure 1. A block diagram of GIDS. 

• Previewer – The Previewer provides visual feedback to the designers so that they may inspect forms in their 

entirety, with custom-formatted and autoformatted sections combined along with boilerplate into the final 

forms. 

• Publisher – The Publisher takes form layouts destined for paper output and produces PostScript® or Adobe® 

Portable Document Format (PDF) files for printing, either with the Census Bureau’s in-house printing 

facilities (for limited-run forms), or by commercial printers (for large-quantity production). 

• Behavior Editor – Electronic forms have behavior (auto-calculated response fields, navigation, data 

validation) in addition to visual layout. The Behavior Editor is the means by which the subject matter experts 

attach behaviors to the various items on a form. 

• Surveyor – The Surveyor is the electronic equivalent of the Publisher—it presents an electronic form to a 

respondent, collects the respondent’s response data, and securely transmits those data back to the Census 

Bureau. 

The next three figures show examples of rendered output from GIDS; all three examples are of output destined 

for paper, rather than online, forms. Figure 2 shows a portion of a simple autoformatted (i.e., rule-based) layout. 

Figure 3 shows a more complex hierarchical autoformatted layout. This example also illustrates the autonumbering and item cross-referencing features built into the GIDS software. The various “Continued” headers 

are also generated automatically, as required, at page breaks. Figure 4 shows a portion of a custom-formatted 

section, one that was laid out “by hand” using the Forms Designer. This example also shows some of the nontext capabilities of GIDS, such as embedded graphics (the barcode at the left edge of the form is generated 

programmatically at form assembly time, and embedded as a bitmap image). On a page-count basis, 

approximately 80% of the Economic Census survey forms consist of autoformatted sections; the remainder are 

custom-formatted. 

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Figure 2. A portion of an autoformatted section of a survey form. 

Figure 5 shows a portion of an electronic survey, as displayed in the Surveyor application. As can be seen, the 

general “look and feel” of the electronic form resembles that of the paper version, but there are numerous small 

differences, the result of tailoring the form display to the characteristics of the presentation medium. 

II. Rationale for using XML-based technologies 

When we first began work on GIDS approximately four years ago, we made the decision to use XML as the 

format for information storage and interchange with other systems. Our decision was based on several factors. 

First, XML is “human-readable.” That is, a person can look at an XML file and deduce the nature of its content, 

at least in principle. In practice, at least some information in an XML file—a graphical image, for example—has 

to be encoded in some sort of non-human-readable format for efficient processing. Even in that case, however, 

it is still possible to include documentary metadata alongside the non-human-readable information that explains 

how it is encoded. 

Second, because XML is a well-defined open standard, it increases the feasibility and practicality of data 

interchange among disparate processing systems. In the case of GIDS, those external systems included relational 

databases, and legacy mainframe-based systems that continue to rely on the same fixed-length 160-column 

record formats that were first developed over thirty years ago. 

Third, the World Wide Web consortium, which develops most XML-based standards, is a thriving nexus of 

innovation in information management and processing. As the repertoire of XML-based standards evolves, we 

begin to reach a point where constructing a fully-customized, full-fledged data processing tool becomes largely a 

matter of choosing from a variety of existing XML-based components and plugging them together. 

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Figure 3. A portion of a hierarchical autoformatted section of a survey form. 

Figure 4. A portion of a custom-formatted section of a survey form. 

Interestingly, when we first proposed the use of XML in GIDS (in early 2000), we were met with strong 

opposition from some of the other parties involved in the project. This opposition could be traced to lack of 

familiarity along with lack of XML support in those parties’ favorite software construction tools. But by the time 

it was necessary to connect the various software components together (early 2002), XML support had become 

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widespread among commercial software vendors, and XML-based connectivity between GIDS components was 

accomplished without difficulty. 

Figure 5. An electronic survey. 

At the time we chose XML, we also selected eXtensible Stylesheet Language Formatting Objects (XSL-FO) as 

the means of describing the text and graphics on the survey forms. However, it became apparent fairly early on 

that the XSL-FO specification would not be sufficiently complete by the time we needed to use it. For that 

reason, we developed our own interim formatting language, SFO, which we based loosely on the existing XSLFO specification, with the intention being that we would eventually merge SFO with XSL-FO. 

A key requirement of the Economic Census is precise control over all aspects of the visual appearance of the 

forms: typography, position of elements, colors, etc. SFO was designed with this requirement in mind, and many 

of the design decisions derive directly from it. All of the example forms shown in Figures 2–5 are stored in SFO 

format and then rendered on paper or on screen as needed. 

III. Rationale for using web services 

Most interaction and data interchange on the World Wide Web involves at least one active human participant 

(the person sitting in front of a computer, using a web browser). The web infrastructure, however, is also 

amenable to computer-computer data interchange, without human intervention, and this is the motivation for 

the creation of web services. 

GIDS uses web services technology in a fairly simple and straightforward manner: The Surveyor application, 

running on a respondent’s computer, automatically connects to a Census Bureau server over the Internet to 

retrieve the appropriate list of forms (based on the respondent’s identification code), the forms themselves, and 

any prelisted survey data, such as name and address. Similarly, the Surveyor uses the same web services 

framework to upload response data back to the Census Bureau server. 

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The XML-based standards used for these transactions are the Secure Sockets Layer (SSL), which provides for 

encryption and data security, and the Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP), which describes the actual 

mechanics of data interchange. Although the use of SOAP, and web services in general, was limited, the intent is 

to broaden the scope in the future. For example, it may be possible in the future for a respondent’s accounting 

application to communicate directly with a Census Bureau server to provide financial information for a survey, 

while at the same time the respondent’s human resources management application is providing personnel 

information for the same survey. 

IV. The role of metadata 

Although we describe GIDS as being metadata-driven, the kinds of metadata used by GIDS are generally simple 

(field types and lengths, question captions, etc.). In order to extend and generalize the concepts used in the 

design of GIDS across the overwhelming diversity of business and government applications, the availability of 

high-quality metadata is an absolute requirement. This is especially important in the context of increasingly 

complex computer-computer data interchange via web services; The only thing worse than having to manually 

enter survey data for a thousand separate business establishments is having your computer do it for you—but 

send all of the wrong data. The development of high-quality metadata is probably the single largest challenge 

facing the information and knowledge management communities, for today and for the foreseeable future. 

V. Current work 

As mentioned previously, we had designed the SFO layout and formatting language with the intention of 

merging it into XSL-FO when the latter standard became fully stabilized. But as we accumulated experience with 

GIDS and SFO, it became clear that XSL-FO was probably not the best choice for our purposes. Instead, we 

have decided to use the Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) standard as the basis for layout and formatting in the 

next generation of GIDS. We will also use XForms to represent data sets and to provide the use interface 

controls on electronic forms. Both SVG and XForms rely on other World Wide Web standards, such as XPath 

and XPointer for navigation within an XML document, XLink for linking between documents, Cascading Style 

Sheets (CSS) for visual formatting, etc. We will increasingly apply SOAP and web services in more demanding 

inter-computer data interchange roles. 

By basing GIDS on a number of well-defined and open standards, our goal is to design a system that is freely 

accessible to third-party software components, including those written by end users (e.g., survey respondents) as 

well as by other software vendors. 

Fenestra is also involved in the “eForms for eGov” initiative whose goal is to achieve widespread adoption of 

electronic data collection and dissemination throughout the Federal Government. One of the key pieces of such 

a system, and one that currently lacks an acceptable standard as a basis, is a comprehensive information and 

knowledge management system. Through eForms/eGov and other avenues, Fenestra is pursuing the creation of 

a standard for information management. 

VI. Summary 

Overall, the GIDS project and the 2002 Economic Survey stand as an extremely successful example of the use of 

XML-based technologies and the Internet . At the time of this writing, over NN paper surveys and NN 

electronic surveys have been submitted to the Census Bureau. The use of XML as the standard interchange

format proved to be a wise decision, as the problems encountered when transferring data between disparate 

systems, often the most difficult part of a data collection and dissemination project, were minimal. The lack of 

availability of high-quality metadata represents the most significant hurdle that must be overcome before the goal 

of broad cross-agency and cross-business data interchange can be achieved. 

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