Irish Spatial Data Infrastructure and Small Area Statistics

1
Irish Spatial Data Infrastructure and Small Area
Statistics

• Iain Greenway and
• Bruce McCormack

2
The vision

• Spatial data from all sources fitting a common
  reference frame
• All divisions of the landscape being in harmony
• Collective agreement on the frame to be used,
  including the small areas within it

3
The work in hand

• On small areas
• On a Spatial Data Infrastructure for Ireland

4
Generic divisions

• Counties
• Baronies
• Townlands
• Civil parishes

5
Local government divisions

• County council
• Town council
• City Council
• Borough council
• Electoral divisions (ED)

6
Other divisions

• Court jurisdictions
• Enumeration areas
• Health boards
• Constituency boundaries
• Gaeltacht areas
• Postal delivery boundaries
• Etc

7
Criteria for small areas

• Exhaustiveness
• Nesting
• Historical consistency (and constancy)
• Sufficiently fine disaggregation
• Clear definition
• Collective ownership
• Sensible division
• Wide usage

8
History interferes?

• Rivers and water courses
• Urban expansion

9
Current thinking

• Rural areas
• Townland?
• Urban areas
• What?
• The shift from rural to urban
• How?

10
Next steps

• A gathering of interested experts
• Recommendations for review
• Early decisions and widespread adoption

11
ISDI background

• 2002 Information Society Action Plan New
  Connections
• November 2002 DoEHLG appointed as lead department
• Done to date
• Established ISDI Work Group
• Established reporting lines
• Networking
• Seminar for all departments and selected agencies
• Boundaries data as short term deliverable

12
What is an SDI

• The technology, policies, standards, human
  resources, and related activities necessary to
  acquire, process, distribute, use, maintain, and
  preserve spatial data.
• Groundrules and arrangements for spatial data
  from different data bases to be interrogated and
  seamlessly integrated without undue difficulties
  and to be made available on a widespread basis.
• Groundrules - eg standards, particularly in
  relation to metadata, catalogue, data coding for
  certain types of data etc
• Arrangements eg finance, data pricing,
  organisational roles and responsibilities, portal
  etc

13
Why is an ISDI needed

• Joined up government
• Improved policy making
• Better targetting of facilities, infrastructure
  and services
• Better monitoring and review
• More informed public
• Supporting the economy

14
Some problems to overcome

• Data
• Legal
• Organisational
• Financial
• Human
• Lack of suitable stable small areas framework

15
Vision and Principles

• Vision
• To have harmonized and high quality spatial
  information and associated attribute data
  readily available and widely used in ways which
  effectively meet social, economic, environmental
  and governance needs.
• Principles
• Collect data once
• Maintain at appropriate level
• Seamless combining
• Sharing amongs many users
• Minimise restraints on wide usage
• Easy to discover
• Easy to understand and interpret
• Compatible with NI, Europe and world
  infrastructures

16
Implementation programme

• Phase 1 (2004) Research, consulation, policy,
  certain systems development
• Phase 2 (2005) Implementation of key elements
• Phase 3 (2006 gt) expansion, consolidation,
  monitoring and review
• Targets in Phase 1
• Consultation paper
• Establish Consultation Forum
• Certain research
• Guidelines to departments
• ISDI Policy Framework

17
How ISDI could benefit Small Areas research and
analysis

• Agreed Small Areas framework
• More attribute data suitably spatially tagged
• Improved discovery of data
• Improved visualisation
• Faciltating spatial aggregation and
  disaggregation
• Clarifying and where possible resolving privacy
  and intellectual property rights issues

18
Challenge

• Help get an agreed Small Areas Framework