United States government services are becoming increasingly Web-based, creating opportunities to make useful, even vital, information and services more accessible to citizens than in the past. This opportunity has challenged Federal agencies as they work to provide information and services that are easy to use and understandable to an extremely diverse constituency. This paper reports the findings of a study examining the questions and uncertainties of users during investigation of statistical tables.The questions and uncertainties are categorized, mapped to an XML DTD for use in a table-browsing system. Implications of the approach and results are discussed. STUDY OVERVIEWAs the statistical community continues to disseminate its information electronically, it will become ever more critical for the metadata behind the data to be easily available for users and applications. The statistical agencies have been addressing these challenges via a variety of strategies and approaches.As illustrated by this research, enabling universal access and usability of statistical tables can be modeled as a process in which a user with an information need comes to a system in order to locate and then use a table or tables of interest. This paper reports on several specific technologies that were developed to support this process.This project addressed the following questions:• What questions and uncertainties do users have when investigating the statistical tables used in the NSF project? • What are the answers to these questions? • To what extent is metadata available to answer the questions? • How do the questions, question types, and answers map to the XML DTD developed by the NSF project to support the Table Browser? This study demonstrated that users have a variety of questions, some of may be easily resolved with available electronic documentation The preponderance of definitional questions had fairly easy resolutions, and in fact, definitions of variables, categories of variables, etc. are already well documented within existing metadata systems. This makes answers easy to retrieve.Some uncertainties are much more complex, however, in particular those relating to rationales. Answers to these questions seem to require a richer domain knowledge that might be difficult to retrieve. The categorization scheme developed in the project can serve to categorize questions in future studies in which the goal is to map to metadata sources and specify tool implementations.While users often have uncertainties that are highly contextual and related to their specific situation and experience, it is difficult to anticipate those in advance and provide previously encoded solutions. Finding the balance between completely contextualized and general answers needs further exploration. FUTURE RESEARCHThis work might be furthered with the following additional research:• Expand the identification and coding of user uncertainties to additional tables in order to further validate the coding scheme, potentially begin to determine relative frequencies ...