Background on USDA's New Agricultural Transportation Open Data Platform

This article has been reprinted from the Aug. 1 USDA Grain Transportation Report.

In early June, the Transportation Services Division (TSD) of USDA’s Agricultural Marketing Service (AMS) launched a new, free-to-use, open data platform https://agtransport.usda.gov to make data and insights more usable, discoverable, accessible, and sharable for stakeholders.

This article provides a brief introduction to the purpose behind the platform, some of its features, and how to get started.

The Goal of the Platform

The mission of AMS is to facilitate the orderly marketing of U.S. agricultural products in domestic and international markets.

TSD contributes to this mission by transparently providing data and analysis on the transportation of agricultural products.

This new open data platform advances the AMS mission by significantly enhancing stakeholders’ ability to access, interact with, visualize, and share agricultural transportation data.

The primary goal of the new data platform is to improve the delivery of agricultural transportation data to stakeholders.

A variety of USDA stakeholders, including farmers, shippers, carriers, analysts, and others, use data to make better business decisions and improve their understanding of complicated agricultural transportation markets.

Each of these users has different needs and preferences when it comes to what data to access and how best to interact with it for their unique purposes.

The new platform provides greater functionality to better meet the diversity of user needs by making agricultural transportation data more available, usable, discoverable, and shareable—in a word—open.

Key Features of the Platform

Available: On the new platform, data is downloadable in many different formats (e.g., CSV, Microsoft Excel, XML, etc.), as well as through powerful APIs.

These features give users more control over exactly what data they access and how.

The platform enables users to create their own unique views of a dataset through filtering, aggregating, and sorting.

Once saved, stakeholders can return to their view for a personalized, up-to-date window into the data.

Additionally, APIs are automatically built into every dataset and derived views. APIs offer a powerful way to interact with the data programmatically.

This is valuable to users looking to load the latest data into their own software automatically by just hitting refresh.

Similarly, it opens the door to web and mobile apps built off the data.

Usable: Stakeholders can easily glean insight from the prepopulated visuals we have created, as well as from ones they create themselves.

The platform now provides quick and ready insights by combining visualizations and text into “Dashboards.”

These dashboards cover an array of topics, such as rail transportation, barge transportation, fuel, exports, and more.

The images in Figure 1 are examples of the many interactive visualizations available on the website.

In addition, with only a few clicks, stakeholders can create insightful visualizations that directly meet their specific needs.

This can be done from every dataset and the process includes quick and easy mapping capabilities.

Moreover, every dataset on the platform is accompanied by structured “metadata” (data about the data) that tells users exactly how to use and understand the data.

Access to metadata lowers the chances of misunderstanding or misusing the data.

Discoverable: All content, from data and visualizations to stories, on the platform can be easily found in the Data Catalog.

Content is logically categorized, described, and tagged.

Stakeholders can also filter and search to find what they need.

The Catalog also enables users to discover other relevant data on the platform of which they were not aware.

Shareable: Content on the platform is easy to share on the web.

On the platform, every table and chart includes a direct link, as well as html or JavaScript embed codes, to reproduce those visuals elsewhere on the web.

They can then be used for things like a blog or in a web newsletter.

When content on the platform is embedded in user-saved visualizations, the data that supports such visualizations will automatically be updated as it is refreshed on the platform.

In addition, the platform has functionality to collect and share users’ unique visualizations (if the user chooses to share) to benefit the entire community of stakeholders.

With this open data platform, we hope to expand the community around our data by strengthening ties with existing users and building relationships with new ones, ultimately creating an environment in which we all learn and grow.

Get Started

You can find the platform at https://agtransport.usda.gov.

Refer to the Welcome Page for more general information, and the How-To Page for tutorials on common first steps.

Select the Help and How-To Menu at the top of the Home Page for even more support information.

We encourage you to: (1) Find what you need in the Data Catalog (2) View our stories and dashboards (3) Preview and download data (4) Create your own visualizations (5) Filter a dataset to directly fit your needs

We sincerely hope you find this new tool be a valuable improvement in our data delivery.

We encourage you to keep returning to the platform, as we update the data weekly and plan to add new content, datasets and stories over time.

We would greatly appreciate your feedback on how to further improve the platform