An Architecture for Mining and Visualization of U.S. Higher Educational Data

Higher education has undergone considerable change in the past decades. As a result, the higher education community is collecting and disseminating a great deal of data that is typically used to benchmark performance or satisfy reporting requirements. This data is a rich source for scholarly inquiry, and particularly interesting for questions related to investment strategies within the academy. However, the real value of these data sets can often only realized when the data is viewed and studied across the aggregate collection of data sources. This is a complex task that requires gathering, cleaning, and applying consistent metadata standards to data sets. This paper presents a Unified Data Framework that allows the aggregation of high demand data sources into a single useful research resource that is relevant to research in higher education. The Unified Data Framework guides the aggregation of existing and new data sets, and provides the option of connecting and automatically, or semi-automatically, updating data from the original sources. The Unified Data Framework presents to researchers of higher education a robust suite of analytic tools for data mining and visualization of combined and complex data sources.