News Organization — Building a Unified Public Data Analytics Platform on AWS
Client Overview
A U.S.-based news organization focused on transparency and open civic discussion sought to empower its audience by providing data-driven insights into public information. The organization allows viewers to express their opinions anonymously, without any tracking, while enabling them to explore factual data sourced from verified government datasets.
As the scale and diversity of available data grew, the organization faced challenges in integrating datasets of varied formats, granularity, and structures across multiple government agencies.
Problem: Complex and Disconnected Public Data Ecosystem
The organization needed to unify and standardize large volumes of public datasets to power its analytics-driven news platform. The project involved integrating data from multiple open government data sources:
– U.S. Government Spending (USAspending.gov)
– U.S. Census Bureau
– Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC)
– Department of Education
– Department of the Treasury
– Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS)
Challenges Faced:
– Massive data volume with billions of records.
– Varied granularity and schema differences between agencies.
– Heterogeneous data formats (Excel, CSV, API, Postgres exports).
– Difficulty matching and correlating entities across data sources.
– Absence of a unified data model to drive analytics and interactive visualizations.
Solution: AWS Data Lake and Analytics Architecture
Business Compass LLC partnered with the organization to design and implement a scalable, cloud-native data lake and analytics pipeline on AWS. The goal was to ingest, standardize, and model public datasets into a unified analytics layer powering both backend systems and public-facing dashboards.
1. Data Ingestion and Storage
– Created a centralized data lake on Amazon S3 to ingest data from diverse public sources including Excel, CSV, and database dumps.
– Developed ingestion pipelines to automate periodic data pulls from open APIs and government repositories.
– Implemented version control and archival for historical data snapshots.
2. Data Processing and Standardization
– Used AWS Glue to perform ETL for data cleaning, normalization, and entity resolution.
– Standardized key identifiers (agency codes, regional IDs, fiscal year formats) to enable cross-agency correlation.
– Designed and implemented a star schema to harmonize data relationships and improve query efficiency.
– Leveraged Amazon Athena for serverless SQL-based data validation and querying.
3. Data Warehouse and Application Integration
– Stored processed and curated datasets in Amazon RDS (MySQL) and Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL for analytical workloads.
– Deployed selective datasets into Amazon DynamoDB to support high-performance queries for application APIs.
– Optimized query design for scalability and low-latency access.
4. Visualization and Embedded Analytics
– Built dynamic Amazon QuickSight dashboards showcasing key insights on spending, demographics, and employment metrics.
– Embedded these dashboards within the organization’s internal portal and news interface.
– Configured automated refresh schedules and role-based access controls to ensure up-to-date analytics.
Outcome: Unified and Intelligent Public Data Platform
The AWS-based data lake and analytics platform revolutionized how the organization manages and delivers insights from public datasets.
Before vs After:
– Fragmented datasets across agencies → Centralized data lake with standardized schema
– Manual CSV/Excel-based analytics → Automated ETL using AWS Glue and Athena
– Disconnected metrics → Unified star schema across agencies
– Limited visualization capabilities → Embedded, real-time QuickSight dashboards
– High-latency queries → Optimized performance using MySQL, PostgreSQL, and DynamoDB
Key Results:
– Consolidated billions of public records from six major U.S. agencies.
– Established a unified and standardized data model across multiple domains.
– Reduced manual data preparation by more than 85%.
– Enabled interactive, embedded analytics for both internal teams and public-facing viewers.
– Provided trustworthy, transparent insights while maintaining user anonymity.
AWS Services Utilized
– Amazon S3
– AWS Glue
– Amazon Athena
– Amazon RDS (MySQL & PostgreSQL)
– Amazon DynamoDB
– Amazon QuickSight
Conclusion
Through its partnership with Business Compass LLC, the news organization transformed fragmented public data into a powerful analytics platform built on AWS.
The new solution provides a scalable foundation for ingesting, standardizing, and analyzing data from multiple agencies, ensuring transparency and public access to factual information. Embedded analytics empower both internal analysts and viewers to explore trustworthy data while maintaining complete anonymity.
This digital transformation positioned the organization as a leader in open-data journalism, enabling citizens to access, interpret, and express opinions about public information securely and confidently.