Data from a single source is no longer enough. With ever more complex issues to solve, there is a greater focus on integrating data assets. Geography is the common language that integrates information from various sources, believes Olivia Powell, Head of Geography & Geospatial, Office for National Statistics, UK.
What is the vision and mission of your organization?
The Office for National Statistics is the UK’s largest independent producer of official statistics and its recognized national statistical institute; it is responsible for collecting, analyzing, and disseminating statistics about the UK’s economy, society, and population for the public good.
Its mission is to provide high-quality data and analysis for the public good to inform the UK, improve lives and build the future. We are driven to work in ways that deliver radical, ambitious, inclusive, and sustainable solutions.
The Geospatial Unit supports this mission by making geography and statistics easy and accessible to all.
What do you envision the future geospatial ecosystem to be like? How different do you think it will be from the current geospatial ecosystem?
More and more organizations, including government departments or agencies, are turning to cloud solutions to be able to handle, manipulate and analyze data. At the same time, the challenges we face are increasingly complex and cannot be tackled or resolved in silos. Data from a single source is no longer enough. With ever more complex issues to solve, there is a greater focus on integrating data assets. ‘Geography’ is the common language that integrates information from various sources.
Internationally we can see a global uptake of multilateral geospatial frameworks such as the United Nations’ Integrated Geospatial Information Framework (IGIF), developed by the UN’s Committee of Experts for the Global Geospatial Information Management (UN-GGIM).
There is also an increasing need for collaboration and data sharing between organizations and government departments, where technology allows for data to flow within various geospatial ecosystems, providing the opportunity to pull disparate datasets together in a single context to produce a bigger picture. There is a real drive to share data more broadly, but due to the vast and increasing amount of information, there is also a need to limit data duplication in multiple systems.
With the increasing adoption of geospatial technology and data across sectors, how does your agency keep track of the evolving demand and requirements of users?
Being the most data-driven government department, the Office for National Statistics (ONS) is always looking at improving the accessibility and findability for content, which users find under the Open Government License (OGL). However, publishing and disseminating data so widely also has challenges when understanding our user requirements. At ONS Geography, we’re keeping an eye on what’s happening around us, especially concerning best practices, standards, and innovation. We work across teams to deliver the best products we can. We are currently looking at ways to engage more with our user base and how to reach out to gain insights into their requirements.
Is your agency making efforts to make geospatial knowledge accessible to non-spatial experts? If yes, what are the initiatives involved?
The Office for National Statistics delivers statistics for all, and to do so, we follow very complex data and analytical processes. Because of our vast range of users, we always strive to make it easy for them to find the data they need—our user-base ranges from public members and policymakers to skilled analysts. Most are unlikely to have spatial sciences acumen.
We continuously review our services and have a range of initiatives to ‘make data easy’ for users. Our Digital Publishing team launched a new data visualization service this year through our interactive Census Maps (Alpha). It provides easy-to-understand visualized data from our latest Census 2021 data release, one indicator at a time and at a localized level.
We aim to make geography easier for our more advanced users, such as data analysts, who might need to be spatial experts.
Regarding experts such as analysts, who require access to multiple datasets, the ONS is leading a UK cross-government initiative bringing together ready-to-use data to enable faster and broader collaborative analysis for the public good: the Integrated Data Service (IDS).
This will provide improved forms of data, alongside analytical and visualization tools, in a secure multi-cloud infrastructure. Data from multiple sources is brought together through a robust data engineering process that enables the de-identification of datasets using data linkage based on a comprehensive data management solution called Reference Data Management Framework (RDMF).
This framework allows for the vast volume and variety of data that we increasingly handle to be processed, managed, and linked through five key referencing indexes, including its two major and pivotal indexes: the Address Index and the Geography Index. Location is at the heart of this and helps maximize the benefit of data standardization, transparency, and consistency.
The ONS Geography team also leads capability building for geospatial and statistics across the UK government and internationally. We publish guidance, training resources, and other materials, such as code and tools, on our GitHub pages.
How does your agency deal with the increasing demand for digital transformation? What are the major challenges associated with digital transformation?
The increasing availability of faster data sources, such as Earth Observations and mobility data, unlocks the potential for us to analyze and understand issues previously considered too complex for us to approach, building new use cases and demonstrating the value of geospatial data.
At a national level and around the world, the pandemic sparked a greater need for spatial data to inform central government policies. The ONS’ geospatial division in the UK was flooded with data requests like never before.
A resulting challenge from this influx of data, which resolution and timeliness improve daily, means that greater computing power was necessary to harness those new opportunities. Cloud technology is an essential part of this, enabling further automation and machine learning.
There is still a lot of work to be done to ensure we have a robust and flexible yet secure spatial data infrastructure that enables us to continue improving our services, including promptly providing a more comprehensive range of statistics.
Are new business models being explored to adapt to the evolving roles and mandates and the new modes of collaboration? If yes, what are the new business models being adopted or explored?
A trend that is apparent and emerging from the growth in data and technological advancements is a greater need for collaboration and better data integration.
Collaboration between organizations is key. The ONS has a clear agreement with key organizations. Still, from a geospatial perspective, there is an increasing drive to work closer with other geospatial agencies, such as Ordnance Survey, for things like developing new geospatial data products, etc.
