The VISTA group needed population estimates that were not supplied by either the Census Bureau or by the Washington State Office of Financial Management (OFM). What they needed were small area population estimates with a complete matrix of race, Hispanic ethnicity, detailed age, and sex. They needed these as a continuous series for every year 1990 to present so that they could be used for trend analysis. These estimates needed to agree with published OFM numbers at the county level and with 1990 and 2000 Census counts. This paper outlines an Object-Oriented Metadata-Driven Approach to solving this problem and in the process develope a set of tools to simplify similar efforts in the future.
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