easyBLS, a Tool for Querying Nonfatal Injury Information from United States Bureau of Labor Statistics Database

摘要

Every year, the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) collects and publishes important information on the number and types of occupational injuries and illnesses affecting workers across all industries. Researchers, occupational safety and health professionals, epidemiologists and industry groups rely on this data to make conclusions about past, present, and future injury and illness trends. The data are also very important in determining the root causes of workplace injury and developing effective interventions. The BLS provides two web tools to query nonfatal injury data from the database. However, one of the tools is no longer functioning, while the other has relatively low query efficiency (more than twenty seconds per query) as tested in this study. Furthermore, there is no data visualization tool provided to help display the queried information. easyBLS (Desktop and web version) was developed to query information from the BLS database with relatively high efficiency (less than one second per query). This tool also provides two data visualization tools (line graph and map) to help users to better interpret the queried information. easyBLS web version is available to the public at http://easybls.pythonanywhere.com/.