What is a Topic?

StateBook has a wealth of data across a wide variety of topics.  As of our last count, there are over 32 billion bits of data that can be retrieved.  This much data certainly requires organization.  StateBook uses topics as a first step toward organizing this data.  

A topic is a way of organizing data into a logical group. While that may seem obvious, we quickly discover that people group data in different ways.  Let's take the simple example of Demographics. 

Sample demographics

• Population, Gender, and Age
• Race and Ethnicity
• Language
• Education level
• Annual Income
• Home ownership or rental costs

A high-level perspective

For some people, Demographics will be one topic and they will only want highlights:

• Demographics
  • Current population
  • Percentage of male and female population
  • Median age
  • Top racial and ethnic categories
  • Primary language
  • Highest education level achieved
  • Median household income
  • Median home ownership cost
  • Median rent

A detailed perspective

For other people, each one of these categories is a separate and independent topic.  "Population, age and gender" could be one topic and "Race and ethnicity" could be another topic.  Even within each of those, there can be further topics as shown below.

• Population, age, and gender
  • Total population
  • Male and female population
  • Population broken out by age brackets, with or without gender
  • Population trends over time
  • Population distributions within a geography, showing population density
• Race and ethnicity
  • Population of each race or for combinations of races.
  • Population of Hispanic or non-Hispanic ethnicity
  • Racial or ethnic population trends over time
  • Racial or ethnic population distributions within a geography
• Languages
  • Languages spoken at home, including both common and uncommon languages
  • Language trends over time
  • Language distributions within a geography
• Education level
  • Current education enrollment
  • Years of education completed
  • Specific degrees or vocational awards over time from individual institutions
  • Educational enrollment and attainment trends over time
  • Educational enrollment and attainment distributions within a geography
  • Migration into or out of a region based on education level
• Annual income
  • Median household income
  • Mean household income
  • Per capita income
  • Householder income broken out by age and gender
  • Income trends over time
  • Income distributions within a geography
  • Migration into or out of a region based on income level
• Home ownership and rental costs
  • Number of housing units
  • Median home values
  • Median home ownership and rental costs
  • Distribution of housing units by housing value
  • Comparisons of home ownership as a percentage of household income
  • Comparisons of rental costs as a percentage of household income
  • Home value and ownership cost trends over time
  • Home value and ownership cost distributions within a geography

So, what is a topic?

A topic is necessarily fluid.  It needs to be focused on answering a person's question and different people have different questions.   A topic is a logical group of data, but it could be fairly broad for those who want a high-level view, or it can be very specific for those people that want to dive deep into the data to understand the nuances of a particular area. 

StateBook provides a wide variety of topics, including high-level, mid-level, and deep-dive topics.  An important step when implementing Calypso data is determining what questions you want to answer and therefore which topics you want to display.