Case Studies

Department for Communities and Local Government UK

The department collects and produces statistical information, analysis and advice on the following key topics/areas:

• Local Government Finance including the distribution of grant and monitoring of local government spending (information which also feeds into ONS’s National Accounts and HMT’s Public Finance statistics );
• The Housing Market – embracing the English Housing Survey, and statistical collections covering House building, Housing affordability, and Homelessness;
• Planning and Land Use;
• Deprivation;
• Local Transparency and Accountability;
• Sustainability and Energy Efficiency in the house building industry;
• Fire and Rescue;
• DCLG’s own Workforce; Diversity.

DCLG currently produces 53 main statistical outputs under the topic areas listed above, of which 25 are designated as National Statistics, and 28 as “other” government statistics.  These products typically comprise multiple outputs in spreadsheet and other formats: more than 4,000 documents in all, per year.

The stakeholders expect that the developed tools will make it easier to produce the datasets as LOSD and that users are better supported to search and understand the data. E.g. for the chosen dataset being local government finance to be able to answer easily the following questions:

• For a given location, which organisation provides which service
• How much is spent on those services
• What is the performance/outcome of these services (future enhancement).

Central Statistics Office

The Central Statistics Office Ireland is the government body responsible for compiling Irish official statistics.
Their mission statement is to carry out “the collection, compilation, extraction and dissemination for statistical purposes of information relating to economic, social and general activities and conditions in the State”.
It is composed of 4 directorates:

• Social and Demographic Statistics
• Economic Statistics
• IT and Corporate Services
• Business Statistics

The CSO conducts surveys to produce numerous statistical publications. The data underlying most publications is disseminated through the StatBank database.

The perhaps most high-profile dataset produced by the CSO is the Census. It is done every five years. The latest results are the Census 2011 results, being the data collected on the night of Sunday April 10, 2011 and counting all the people and households in the country on that night.

The expectations are:

• To re-publish the Irish 2011 Census as Linked Data using the OpenCube tools
• To publish the StatBank as Linked Data
• To publish associated code lists and classifications as Linked Data
• To update the CSOs Linked Data portal, data.cso.ie, with the results of the above
• To use the published data in a scenario that requires geospatial analytics and forecasting

Research Unit of the Flemish government

SVR is the research unit of the Flemish government having the mission statement to do research in the fields of demographics, macroeconomics and social-cultural developments; research that enables the Flemish government in establishing ‘better informed’ policies.

The unit is part of the DAR (Ministerie van de Diensten voor het Algemeen Regeringsbeleid) and is structured itself in 3 project groups:

• Research
• Monitoring
• Data and quality.

The pilot partner expects to be able to:

• Publish the cubes available at lokalestatistieken.be as LOSD
• Present these data on maps with different levels of granularity (region, provinces, city)

Examples of using the OpenCube Toolkit by the Research Unit of the Flemish government: example 1 , example 2

Global Macroeconomic Research Unit of a Major Swiss Bank

Our partner is the economic research unit of the Private Banking division of a major Swiss Bank. They focus on investment advice and on provision of expertise to clients, with a special support for senior management.

In addition to this they also provide information on specific themes to the media.

Their focus is on:

• Global macroeconomic research and forecasting
• Swiss economic research.

In particular, they try to forecast economic variables (GDP growth, inflation, short-term interest rates, etc.), central bank decisions, economic policy decisions with different time horizons ranging from monthly or quarterly over (bi-) yearly to longer-term predictions. These forecasts are used in investment decision making, risk management and treasury amongst others.

At the first stage of the project, the pilot is going to demonstrate:

• Browsing the data catalogue to navigate to a relevant dataset.
• Statistical calculations and predictions over public data using an easy interface with R.
• Visualizations of public datasets using charts.

The focus of the pilot will be mainly on the data exploration, visualization, and analytics components.