GeoGraphic

I gave a lecture to UCC MSc students today on the topic “GeoDemographics and GeoCoding: An Introduction to Sources and methods” My slide deck is below.

I’m pretty exited by my next speaking appointment, Ignite Dublin 8, which takes place in The Science Gallery on Pearse St in Dublin next Thursday 8th December. Each Ignite presentation is recorded and posted on YouTube afterwards, I’ll post mine when it’s online, I’m busy writing and re-writing it now.

If you’re not familiar with the Ignite concept, the idea is that each speaker has only 5 minutes and has 20 slides which auto-advance every 15 seconds. This keeps things short and sweet and ensures a wide range of topics can be fitted into each Ignite session – there will be 18 speakers at Ignite Dublin 8, talking about things ranging from Archaeology to Robotics. And Maps, of course!

I’ve given a couple of lectures in DIT Bolton St. over the last few months, and tomorrow it’s DIT Kevin Street’s turn.

This lecture covers a lot more ground than the previous two, as I’ll be talking a lot about Open Source Geo Tools as well as covering Open GeoData.

Here’s the slide deck:

Next Sunday, April 10th, is Census day here in Ireland.  There has been much debate in the media and online over some of the questions asked on the census, particularly those relating to religion and partnership status.  The raising of these two issues in particular could be considered to be a reflection of social change in Ireland, something which the census itself sets out to measure, even if it does so in a way which many consider to be flawed.

Trying to accurately reflect these changes while maintaining links back to previous censuses dating back to 1901 and beyond is a very difficult problem and one which I feel that the CSO has done as well as it can to solve.

I am a GIS specialist who makes use of census data on an almost daily basis. I have written before about some of the kinds of analysis that can be done with the anonymised data which the CSO makes available to researchers.  I think it is fair to say that the census is the most important dataset which people working with Geographic Information in Ireland have available to them.  The fact that the results are made available at no charge to the end user is admirable and long may it continue.

There has been some debate, particularly in the UK, as to whether a census is needed at all.  States such as Denmark are frequently mentioned, as they did away with the manual census process used here in favour of a register based system back in the 1970′s.  A register based system is where different Government departments share their databases and citizens are obliged to inform the government of any change of residence, employment etc.  Some of the required registers are in place in Ireland, notably the General Register Office and GeoDirectory.  But I have my doubts that a Register based census could be established here given our current data protection legislation (among other issues)

What excites me most about Census 2011 is the new ‘Small Areas’ (PDF link) which are the smallest spatial unit for which data will be made available.  This will allow for a much more detailed view of all aspects of our society.  How so?  Well consider the case of the current smallest spatial unit used by the CSO since the early 1980′s – the District Electoral Division (DED).

There are approximately 3,400 DED’s covering the country, and they range in population size from 16 people (Arigna in Leitrim and Lackagh in Tipperary) up to 32,305 in the case of Blanchardstown-Blakestown.  That variation alone is a major problem and makes for skewed results if extreme care is not taken when doing any analysis of census data.  The new Small Areas, of which there are over 19,000, are nested within the DED’s for backwards compatibility, and have been designed to follow urban geometry and natural features.

Here’s an image of the Blanchardstown-Blakestown DED (in blue) with the new Small Areas shown in red:

Blanchardstown-Blakestown DED and Small Areas - Data Copyright OSi and Microsoft Bing

There are 119 Small Areas in the Blanchardstown-Blakestown DED alone, which will allow for much more insightful analysis of the population there – meaning more efficient and effective delivery of services, among a myriad of other benefits.

There has been much speculation that these small areas will form the basis of our new Postcode system (I’ve written about this before too, and I’m not expecting any system to be launched soon), but that remains to be seen.

It will be 18 months to 2 years before we see the census data released at the small area level, but I’m looking forward to being able to map our population in a never before seen level of detail.

I gave a lecture to postgraduate students in DIT Bolton St. last Friday. The lecture seemed to be well received, and was followed up with a hands-on session on editing OpenStreetMap with the new Potlatch 2 editor.

In the interest of sharing, here’s my slide deck, which can be downloaded from Slideshare here:

I’ll write up some thoughts on GIS Ireland 2010 over the weekend, but in the meantime here’s my presentation from the conference: