1. Numbers, places, decisions
Connecting statistical and geographic data
Bill Roberts, Swirrl
@billroberts

6. Objective: ‘analysis ready data’
George Percivall mentioned this morning the theme from the September workshop – ‘analysis ready data’
This is very much the objective here, where the scope is ‘all available statistical data about the places I’m interested in’

7. We’re definitely talking about geodata
We need it to be linked.
Is it big?
In the volume/velocity/variety dimensions, it is ’biggest’ in the sense of variety and that’s what makes it challenging.
Naturally volume and velocity are increasing.
A few hundred billion statistical observations
Over 100s of government organisations
Getting bigger – finer grained in space and time
Big in terms of organisational effort – must be distributed

8. Many organisations providing data
– finding the data you want
– dealing with inconsistency
- Joining the data together

9. Different audiences want different things

11. As well as different ‘technical levels’ for how people want to use it, there are all kinds of niches in terms of the topics that user communities are interested in. There is a role for an intermediary to gather and present data to communities like this.

12. We’re generally talking about multidimensional statistical data – data cubes – and of these the geospatial dimension is usually the richest and most important. Data points are typically referred to an area or point – so there is one spatial dimension, not 3.
There is a lot of ‘structure’ in the spatial dimensions.

13. M1 1EZ 53.481751, -2.234625 Manchester 384526, 398362 Near the station
Use standard spatial techniques and indexing techniques to add some intelligence to this
Near the station
Dale Street

14. Edinburgh, City of City of Edinburgh Edinburgh 230 S12000036
And of course the data is messy – lots of ways to refer to the same thing.

15. Office for National Statistics Dataset catalogue
National Health Service
Dataset downloads
Developers
Correlation tool
Department of Environment
Analysts/Researchers
Poverty map
Department for Work and Pensions
Data journalism
Fact-finders
Sheep database
Local Government
So –what’s the answer.
Decouple presentation method from the data
Distributed, consistent, standards-based publishing – on the web
Not just one data portal
Not just one way to access the data
JSON API
etc
SPARQL query
Etc

16. “The future is already here — it's just not very evenly distributed”
William Gibson

18. Standards and governance Knowledge and skills Tools
What’s the solution?
Standards and governance
Knowledge and skills
Tools
Culture and mindset
Think ‘supply chain’
This is mostly not a technological issue
Standards for:
metadata, data model, vocabularies, codelists
Setting and disseminating what the standards are – allowing for evolution and special cases
Knowledge about the web, skills to use web-based data
Tools for data creation and data consumption – validation etc
Thinking about data as something valuable in itself – that producing good data is part of your job
Supply chain – at the moment most of this data is not ‘analysis ready’. Every analyst has to get their own data ready. It’s a cottage industry – if you’re a furniture maker, you have to go out to the forest and chop down your own tree. Want to industrialise this process and allow people to specialise in different parts of it.