 Number: 2000-29 Date Released: 17 April 2000 |
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The nationwide Census of Population and Housing, to be conducted this May by the National Statistics Office, shall veer away from the traditional keyboard data entry method. Data processing for the more than 15 million Census 2000 questionnaires shall utilize, among others, document imaging and intelligent character recognition technologies. Four data capture centers (DCCs) shall be established by the NSO in strategic sites in Luzon, Visayas and Mindanao for the processing of census questionnaires coming from 42,000 barangays all over the Philippines. Each DCC shall be equipped with its own scanning system and network installation to ensure smooth workflow for the data capture stage. Twenty-two (22) scanners shall be used to capture the census forms. Seven of these scanners shall be in Manila and five each shall be distributed to Pampanga, Cebu and Davao. The selection of the sites for the DCCs was made primarily because of the accessibility and availability of technical support from information technology (IT) vendors in the areas. These DCCs shall also be electronically linked to the Central Office. Each DCC shall be assigned to capture census forms or questionnaires emanating from provinces of pre-defined regions. Questionnaires coming from Regions 1, 2, 3, and Cordillera Administrative Region shall be processed in Pampanga DCC. Forms coming from Regions 4, 5, and NCR shall be captured in Manila DCC. Cebu DCC shall be responsible for those coming from Regions 6, 7, 8 while Davao DCC shall take care of Regions 9, 10, 11, 12, Autonomous Region of Muslim Mindanao and CARAGA. NSO provincial offices shall first "batch" the questionnaires according to geographic codes before sending the same to their respective DCC. At the DCC, images of the documents shall be captured and kept into a mass storage through scanning. Item responses to specific questions in the captured questionnaires shall be extracted and organized into computer-readable (ASCII) data. The resulting ASCII file shall be transmitted to the Census 2000 Regional Project Staff and to the Central Office (CO) for subsequent processing using an NSO-developed system for the preparation and generation of statistical tables at the regional level and at the national level, respectively. According to Administrator Tomas Africa, Batas Pambansa Blg. 72 mandates the NSO to release the population count by province, city, municipality, and barangay before the end of the census year. The final population count shall be proclaimed by the President of the Philippines before December 31, 2000 and shall be considered official for all purposes. Africa also added that prior to the proclamation of the final count, preliminary results of the Census 2000 enumeration by city/municipality shall be released by the NSO on the basis of the Quick Count (QC) on August 19, 2000, three months after the census operations. The QC is actually a monitoring system that shall be adopted by the NSO to provide regular basic information on the progress of field operations. Handheld personal computers (HPCs) or palm tops shall be utilized for this purpose. There are about 250 HPCs distributed to NSO's District Statistics Officers (DSOs) all over the country who shall be responsible for keying-in the data while in the field. The data from the DSOs' HPCs shall be transferred into the desktop computers in the NSO's provincial offices (POs) for the generation of provincial counts. The provincial counts shall then be transmitted via the Internet to the CO which shall enroll them into a Quickcount Database. From the information, the CO shall generate regional and national preliminary counts. Among the basic data that shall be made available by the QC are growth rates at the municipality/city levels, sex ratio, average household size and distribution of population. --- o0o --- Page Last Updated: January 19, 2005  | |