November 2002
Intermediate to advanced
1120 pages
21h 2m
English
As an example of this process, I'm going to use U.S. federal government budget authorization data, which the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) publishes in a variety of equivalent flat formats, even though the data itself is relatively unflat. This is a good example of the sort of legacy data developers often have to deal with. The complete document [http://w3.access.gpo.gov/usbudget/fFY2002/db.html] consists of 3,185 line items. Each line item consists of 43 separate fields. In the comma-separated values (CSV) version of the file, a typical line item looks like this:
"418","National Endowment for the Humanities","00","National Endow- ment for the Humanities","0200","National Endowment for the Humani- ties: grants and administration","59","503","Research ...
Read now
Unlock full access