Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

Geography Data

Q: Why can't I find my city/community/neighborhood/area using the Search tab?

A: First, make sure you are spelling the name correctly when you search. And leave off the state, ZIP Code, etc. If you are not sure of the spelling, try just a few letters to widen the search. At this time, OnTheMap is not very good at handling misspellings. Also, make sure the dropdown is set to "Search All Names".

If you still are unable to find the name you are seeking, then it may not be represented in the official geographic layers provided by the U.S. Census Bureau. The Census Bureau does not always keep the names and boundaries of neighborhoods or small towns without a government structure. If you have questions about why the Census Bureau does not make use of an area name, please contact your Census Bureau Regional Office http://www.census.gov/field/www/ or the Census Bureau's Geography Division geo.geography@census.gov.

Q: Why can't I find my city/community/neighborhood/area in the map viewer?

A: It may be that the correct layer containing your area of interest is not being displayed. First try going to the Base Map tab and turning off any layers you do not need displayed at this point. Then try turning on some other layers that may contain your area of interest. Most confusion arises from the relationship between Places and County Subdivisions. In some states (mostly in the Northeast and Upper Midwest) the County Subdivision Layer has many of the towns and communities that users expect to see in the Places Layer.

Please note that the Census Bureau does not always keep the names and boundaries of neighborhoods or small towns without a government structure. If you have questions about why the Census Bureau does not make use of an area name, please contact your Census Bureau Regional Office http://www.census.gov/field/www/ or the Census Bureau's Geography Division geo.geography@census.gov.

Q: Why isn't a school/university/Amtrak station/One-Stop Center/airport in the right location?

A: Point location data on schools (primary and secondary), colleges/universities, airports, Amtrak stations, and On-Stop Career Centers come from external data sources. OnTheMap provides these data "as-is" for reference purposes only. If you believe that a feature in one of these layers is misplaced, we recommend contacting the agency that owns the data. Contact information for the geographic layers can be found at the OnTheMap Geographic Sources Table.

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Job Data

Q: Why isn't data available for a state/year?

A: Job data in OnTheMap is available for jobs whose workplaces are located in one of the 47 states currently in OnTheMap. The eligible states and territories not yet in OnTheMap are Connecticut, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands, Massachusetts, and New Hampshire. Data are available in all years (2002-2008) except for the following combinations:

2002 - Missing Arizona, Arkansas, and Mississippi.

2003 - Missing Arizona and Mississippi.

2008 - Missing North Carolina.

It is possible to have home locations in states that are missing job data, however these totals will not be complete and should be used with caution.

Q: What is a job?

A: For the purposes of OnTheMap, the LED Partnership defines a job as a link between a worker and a firm at which the worker has been employed during the reference quarter and during the quarter prior to the reference quarter. The reference quarter is Quarter 2 (April-June) of the year of interest. This definition of "job" is sometimes called a "Beginning of Quarter" job because it is assumed that the worker was employed at that firm on the first day of the reference quarter.

Q: Who is being counted?

A: The LED Partnership builds its data infrastructure based upon several core datasets provided by our state partners. These include Unemployment Insurance wage data and the Quarterly Census of Employment in Wages. Coverage under these datasets currently excludes several groups of workers. These include:

• Federal Civilian Employees
• Uniformed Military
• Self-Employed Workers
• Informally Employed Workers

Projects are currently underway to add Federal Civilian Employees and Self-Employed Workers to the LED data infrastructure. For further updates on these projects, please visit the main LED homepage http://lehd.did.census.gov/.

If a worker is employed at more than one job during the referenced period and those jobs are covered by the core datasets, then all of those jobs will be captured in the dataset.

Q: What's a "primary job"?

A: A primary job is defined as the one job for each workers that provides the most earnings. By analyzing primary jobs, you are seeing "one job per worker," whereas analyzing "All Jobs" you are seeing all the jobs held by the workers selected through your spatial query.

Q: What is "synthetic data"?

A: OnTheMap makes use of synthetic data methods to protect confidential information about the residential locations of workers. A synthetic dataset is one that has similar statistic properties to an original dataset but has been created in order allow for the release of data in the public domain without compromising confidentiality in cases where the original dataset cannot be released. In general it would be preferable to work with the original dataset if possible; however, synthetic data are created for OnTheMap because the original data cannot be released.

Q: How is the confidentiality of a worker's/employer's data protected?

A: The U.S. Census Bureau, its employees, and contractors working for it are bound by Titles 13 and 26 of the Federal Code to protect the confidentiality of respondents' information. Information provided to the Census Bureau are protected by several different systems.

Q: How do major disruptive events (e.g. hurricanes) affect the quality of the data?

A: There is no specific answer to this question as each case is different. However, a recent report investigates the issue for major hurricanes in 2005.

In "The Impact of Hurricanes Katrina, Rita and Wilma on Business Establishments", (Journal of Business Valuation and Economic Loss Analysis, 2009 Vol 4, Issue 2) Ron Jarmin and Javier Miranda show that GIS based estimates of the economic impact of the 2005 hurricanes provide a more accurate characterization of affected businesses than estimates constructed from county level data or census block level data. Their methodology relies on mapping business establishments into damage zones defined by remote sensing information provided by FEMA. Their GIS-based estimates indicate the amount of damage using traditional methods is overestimated by as much as 2.1 times when using census block data and as much as 5.6 times when using county based data.

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Application

Q: Why does my analysis time out?

A: Analyses fail to complete because the web server will timeout before the calculation is complete. This typically happens on very large selections (whole states or groups of states). To avoid this you can 1. Restrict your analysis to a single year; 2. Choose the "No Map" option from the Map Precision options in Step 3 of the Analysis tab; or 3. Break your analysis into pieces and add results up after you're done.

Q: Why did my analysis fail?

A: It's difficult to provide a general answer for this question. If, for example, you get an Internal Server Error like these:

or

then you may have found a new bug. Please do the following:

1. If you've got a popup error, click OK.
2. Without changing any settings, go to the top of the OnTheMap application and click the button.
3. Then click the button in the popup that appears. This will allow you to save a small OnTheMap settings file to you computer. It contains enough information to allow us to recreate your analysis. It does not contain any information about you or your computer.
4. Save the file to a location on your computer that you can remember. The filename will be similar to "otm_query_125969737917269.otm".
5. Email this file to CES.Local.Employment.Dynamics@census.gov with the Subject heading of "OnTheMap Version 4 Error".
6. To help us diagnose the problem, please include name of the web browser and its version. (e.g. "I'm using Version 3.5.4 of Firefox." or "I'm using Version 8.0 of Internet Explorer.") We have no other way of knowing these things and it does help us figure out what went wrong.

Q: Why do I get a pink screen in the map viewer?

A: The pink screen appears when the web server times out while generating the base map tiles or thermal overlay images. This typically happens during Shed analyses on large selection areas (whole states or groups of states). To avoid this you can 1. Restrict your analysis to a single year; 2. Change the Map Precision to "Tract", "County", or "No Map" in Step 3 of the Analysis Tab; or 3. Turn off Thermals in the Overlay Control panel of the Results tab.

Q: Why did my shapefile import fail?

A: Shapefile imports may fail for several reasons:

An unknown projection was provided to OnTheMap (in this case, a popup window should tell you that the projection is unknown).

In this case, you have a couple of options. If you have a GIS program that allows you to change projections, open your shapefile in that program and reproject it to USA Contiguous Albers Equal Area Conic and try loading the reprojected shapefile into OnTheMap. Or if you know the name of the projection, you can search for the EPSG code at either http://www.epsg-registry.org/ or at http://spatialreference.org/.

A shapefile import may also fail because the shapefile is too complex or has too many features. If this appears to be the case (OnTheMap will freeze during the import process), then you should try the following steps:

First: Remove all unnecessary features from the shapefile and keep only the one(s) to be used for the analysis.

Second: If limiting the number of features doesn't work, then try simplifying the feature. Many GIS applications have a simplifying routine that removes points that are deemed unnecessary at a certain level of detail.

Q: The shed thermal in my shapefile/KML export seems to be cut off. Why is that?

A: The OnTheMap application limits the geographic scope of the thermals to a large area surrounding the selection area. This is done to prevent users from receiving thermals that span most of the United States when only a small region is of interest (this case would render the thermal useless because only a few pixels of the image would be dedicated to the area of interest). In some cases in which analyses have far-reaching sheds, the application may "clip" the thermal. The distance at which a thermal is clipped is set by taking the maximum of the following distances:

1. The longest distance, North to South, in miles, of the selection area.
2. The longest distance, East to West, in miles, of the selection area.
3. 100 miles

So if you selection area is 5 miles wide in the East-West direction and 10 miles, then the size of the clipped area will be the maximum of 5 miles or 10 miles or 100 miles - which is 100 miles. So the clipping boundary will be a 100 mile square centered at the center of the selection area.

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Other Data

Q: Where do I find the QWI report?

A: Quarterly Workforce Indicators (QWI) appear in Work Area Profile reports. Select "Workplace Area" for the Live or Work parameter in Step 1 of the Analysis tab, and then "Work Area Profile Analysis" in Step 3 to generate a Work Area Profile report.

Q: In a Work Area Profile report, why does the "Total All Private Jobs" count differ from the QWI "Employment, Stable Jobs" count?

A: OnTheMap job data in the Shed and Area Profile reports use the "Beginning of Quarter" definition for jobs. Beginning of Quarter employment is the total number of workers who were employed by the same employer in both the current (2nd) and previous (1st) quarter. The "Employment, Stable Jobs" total in the QWI report is a measure of "Full Quarter" employment, meaning that a worker was employed by the same employer in the current (2nd) quarter, in the previous (1st) quarter, and in the subsequent (3rd) quarter. This will naturally result in a lower number than the "Total All Private Jobs" figure. See Report Terms for more information.

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Known and Unresolved Bugs

Significant bugs will be posted in this section as they are discovered and resolved. Users are encouraged to submit suspected bugs to CES.Local.Employment.Dynamics@census.gov with subject heading 'OnTheMap Version 4'. When submitting potential bugs, please include as much detail as possible including: web browser (and version), internet connection speed, description of suggestion/problem, steps taken leading to problem, etc. Additionally, please click the Save button above the application's map viewer, and attach the resulting ".otm" file to the email.

7. Version 4.1 (7/20/2010): Currently, OnTheMap cannot create a PDF (Map and Report) with a Thermal overlay at zoom level 5 (hover over the scale bar to see zoom level). As a workaround, either export the PDF (Map and Report) without a Thermal overlay or export the PDF (Map and Report) at zoom level 4 or 6.

8. Version 4.1 (8/24/2010): Two WIB areas are displayed incorrectly in OnTheMap:

• "03 City of Atlanta WIB" in Georgia appears in OnTheMap to include area in DeKalb County. The actual extent of this WIB area is limited to the portion of Atlanta in Fulton County. Although the map appears wrong, data tabulated from this WIB area are correct.
• "City of Shreveport WIA" in Louisiana appears in OnTheMap to include area in Bossier Parish. The actual extent of this WIB area is limited to the portion of Shreveport in Caddo Parish. Although the map appears wrong, data tabulated from this WIB area are correct.

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Resolved Bugs

1. RESOLVED, Version 4.1 (5/27/2010): In testing, OnTheMap Version 4's ability to handle large selection areas and generate complex thermal images has been poor. We recommend selecting only one year of data, and advise users to select a Map Precision setting other than "Block" in Step 3 of the Analysis tab. Work is currently underway to improve OnTheMap's performance for a future maintenance release.

2. RESOLVED, Version 4.0.1 (12/17/2009): The Link to Me button is not currently functional. Bug will be resolved in a future maintenance release.

3. RESOLVED, Version 4.0.1 (12/17/2009): The PDF (Map and Report) option and the Print Map button are not currently functional in Internet Explorer. The bug will be resolved in a future maintenance release.

4. RESOLVED, Version 4.0.2 (2/1/2010): Paired Area Analyses on "large" areas currently do not complete. This bug will be resolved in a future maintenance release.

5. RESOLVED, Version 4.0.2 (2/1/2010): In Steps 2 and 2a of the Analysis Tab, at the closest zoom level, some area selections result in a pink screen appearing. This bug will be resolved in a future maintenance release.

6. RESOLVED, Version 4.1 (5/27/2010): TAZ rollups for shed reports may produce a count without a TAZ name or number. This count represents all destinations (home locations in a Labor Shed and work locations in a Commute Shed) which are located in counties that do not have TAZs assigned. This value should be added to the count for "All Other Locations". This bug will be fixed in a future update of OnTheMap.