Additional Training and Reference Materials
We hope you have learned a few new ideas and want to take your data-sharing journey beyond this Guidebook. This section provides references to data architecture resources to guide you as you continue your learning path. Some of these references were used in the creation of this Guidebook.
Internal CalHHS Strategies and Guides
If you are ever stuck, contact your Department’s data coordinator for information on how to find and exchange CHHS data.
CalHHS Information Strategic Plan
CalHHS Master Data Management Strategy
Data sharing materials:
CalHHS Data Sharing - Process Flow
CalHHS Data Sharing - Legal Agreement
CalHHS Data Sharing - Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
Business Use Case Proposal - Form
Business Use Case Proposal - Instructions
Data Architecture and Sharing Reference Materials
The list below provides links to reference materials on data architecture and data-sharing practices:
The Data Management Associate (DAMA) focuses on data and information management and the advancement of the field.
The Findability, Accessibility, Interoperability, and Reusability (FAIR) Guiding Principles were authored to provide data management guidelines and best practices.
The Centre for Agriculture and Bioscience International (CABI) data-sharing toolkit provides online training for data-sharing practices.
Oracle’s Cloud Infrastructure Documentation’s explanation of Data Architecture roles, goals, and practices.
Data Sources
Public data resources are available from a number of online sources, including the federal government and non-profit organizations. Following is a partial list of select data resources that can help contribute to data projects and analyses.
USAFacts.org – A data-driven portrait of the American population, our government’s finances, and government’s impact on society that uses federal, state, and local data from over 70 sources.
Healthdata.gov – Dedicated to making high value health data more accessible to entrepreneurs, researchers, and policy makers in the hopes of better health outcomes for all.
CIA World Fact Book - Provides information on the history, people, government, economy, geography, communications, transportation, military, and transnational issues for 267 world entities.
openFDA – Makes it easier to get access to publicly available FDA data. FDA’s goal is to make it simple for an application, mobile device, web developer, or researcher to use data from the FDA.
Census Reporter – A Knight News Challenge-funded project to make it easier for journalists to write stories using information from the U.S. Census bureau. Place profiles and comparison pages provide a friendly interface for navigating data, including visualizations for a more useful first look.
CalEnviro Screen - A mapping tool that helps identify California communities that are most affected by many sources of pollution, and where people are often especially vulnerable to pollution’s effects.
California Healthy Places Index - A tool to explore community conditions that predict life expectancy. It contains user-friendly mapping and data resources at the census tract level across California.
CHHS Open Data Portal - Offers access to standardized data that can be easily retrieved, combined, downloaded, sorted, searched, analyzed, redistributed and re-used by individuals, business, researchers, journalists, developers, and government to process, trend, and innovate.
Goal Setting
lucidchart.com will help you create a use case diagram
Visual Paradigm will also help you create a use case diagram
For managers, Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are also a great framework for measuring performance relative to your goals.
Check out this resource to learn what they are, why they work, and how to set effective KPIs
Data readiness: Harvard’s Strategic Use of Data Self-Assessment Guide offers a useful template.
Analytics Capability Assessment for Human Service Agencies gives more specific data readiness guidance.
Roadmap to Capacity Building in Analytics - This document is dense, but gives great insight into what you need to carry out a successful product.
Introductory Statistics Tools
Here are some key concepts and help integrating them into Excel
State of California Training and Materials
This section provides links to online training materials for further study of data architecture practices.
A State Library Card is a unique tool for state employees to access research and training materials. After applying for a State Library Card, you can access technical resources such as materials from O’Reilly for Higher Education.
Premier Advantage California eLearning PACe is the Office of Professional Development’s eLearning offering for IT and business professionals.
General Online Training Materials
The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) is a gateway to eLearning, books/videos, research, and the overall computing community. You can access the materials you need to develop your data management knowledge and forge connections with other professionals to advance the field.
Data Visualization (Beginner to Advanced)
If you just need a quick chart or table, check out these online tools — they are simpler to use than the advanced data visualization guides and may be more appropriate for your specific project:
Google Charts (interactive charts & simple data tools)
DataWrapper (charts, tables, and maps)
Infogram (beginner-friendly, collaborative, focuses on design thinking principles)
More sophisticated guides are listed below:
Beginner
A suite of easy-to-use web tools for beginners that introduce concepts of working with data. These simple tools make it easy to work with data in fun ways, so you can learn how to find great stories to tell.
Beginner
This article summarizing general Data Visualization strategies and common methods used in different professions and sectors.
Beginner
Tableau’s Data Visualization for Beginners: a Definition & Learning Guide with helpful examples
Beginner-Intermediate
Kaggle’s Data Visualization Course teaches you how to implement some more basic, powerful data visualization techniques (line charts, scatter plots, and distributions) and how to choose the right one.
Intermediate
A visualization grammar, a declarative language for creating, saving, and sharing interactive visualization designs. With Vega, you can describe the visual appearance and interactive behavior of a visualization in a JSON format and generate web-based views using Canvas or SVG.
Intermediate-Advanced
The Data Visualization Catalogue has a comprehensive list of charts that are separated by what data visualization function they employ.
Advanced
Data-Driven Documents D3 is a JavaScript library for manipulating documents based on data. D3 helps you bring data to life using HTML, SVG, and CSS. D3’s emphasis on web standards gives you the full capabilities of modern browsers without tying yourself to a proprietary framework, combining powerful visualization components and a data-driven approach to DOM manipulation.
All Levels
Coursera often has free online Data Visualization Courses — check to see if one is available!
Presenting your Data
Color Contrast Grid
Use the Color Contrast Grid tool to test many foreground and background color combos for compliance with WCAG 2.0 minimum contrast.
Hemingway
Use a word editing app like Hemingway to improve the readability of your writing. Hemingway will highlight lengthy or run-on sentences, remove overly dense writing, offer alternatives for weak adverbs and phrases as well as poor formatting choices.
Visualize Your Story
Visualize your story with a storyboard (see MIT’s guide to finding a story in your data)
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