Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse: SAS ®-Based Warehouse and Mining Tools Keep Tabs on U.S. Government

Management, has developed a subscription website that allows many different types of users to access transactional data from the U.S. federal government. Subscribers include journalists, lawyers, judges, congressional staffers, public interest groups, and scholars. TRAC’s end-users often lack experience with performing statistical or data analyses. Our challenge has been to develop a “point-and-click ” interface that allows users to specify what information they would like, without the necessity of knowing how the data are organized or how the statistics are generated. The power of TRAC’s application lies in the combination of the data warehouse and data mining tools. Both of these are SAS-based using a variety of SAS Products including SAS/SHARE ® , SAS/IntrNet ® , SAS/GRAPH ® , SAS/STAT ®, and SAS/CONNECT ®. The tasks of creating, maintaining, and updating the warehouse plus designing user-friendly, instructional tools have presented an ongoing stream of problems to solve, often with the aid of SAS routines. Accomplishing this on a research center budget (upgradeable to a shoestring) has taught us many valuable lessons. While the challenges faced by TRAC are in some respects unique, other SAS users can adapt our solutions to solve their own unique problems