Tuesday 13 October - London
Civil Service Club, 13-15 Great Scotland Yard, London SW1A 2HJ

Wednesday 14 October - Wales
Cardiff Marriott Hotel, Mill Lane, Cardiff, Wales CF10 1EX

Monday 19 October - Gateshead
Newcastle Marriott Metrocentre, Marconi Way, Gateshead NE11 9XF

Tuesday 20 October - Manchester
Manchester Malmaison, 1-3 Piccadilly, Manchester M1 1LZ

Wednesday 21 October - London
Civil Service Club, 13-15 Great Scotland Yard, London SW1

Monday 22 October - Leicester
Marriot Hotel, Smith Way, Grovepark, Enderby, LE19 1SW

See more details about the events, and how to register here.

The only extra I can think of is similar comparisons and metadata for geographic changes. As OA's are not constant, i.e. some will be split or merged (< 5%) information to identify these will be required. Indeed being able to select these, may even be required as they will potentially be the areas of greatest change.

There are prerequisites for the supply of boundaries for other geographies as detailed on the ONS Geography website.

Is this true, will COA boundaries be charged for?

Calculating participation rates is likely to become an area of increased focus for government departments, and I would like to be able to calculate more accurate participation rates. It is possible to determine from Census 2001 data the exact number of students whose term-time and home addresses are different, enumerated at their home address, but it is not possible to cross reference this data with all students enumerated at their term-time address in order to identify which students to remove, therefore the number of students to be removed must be estimated from available data.

I have raised this on several occasions and have no idea how or if this might be addressed in the 2011 Census.

I would sugest the addition of SARS as a topic and to split the geography section into statistical and administrative. Not sure what you intend to include under "special data products"

The section on SDC is welcome, but the implications of it may need to be included in the "understanding" section as well.

In 2011 this is worth remembering when whatever arrangements are put into place, otherwise a useful dataset may lose it's value if access is unduely restricted.

The origin destination tables, especially at low geographies, will be greatly affected.

The method itself should be unbiased, so that a total of 50 people travelling from OA1 to OA2 would have an expected value of 50, but there is significant variation between the published total (which is a sum of protected counts) either above or below the unperturbed total.

The variation can be seen for OA to OA counts broken down by different variables. For example, using a breakdown by age and sex could give a total of 25, a breakdown by economic activity could give a total of 33. By taking all the different published breakdowns and averaging the totals, one gets a still unbiased estimate and with far less variability from the unprotected count.

For the 2011 Census, we have already proposed that origin destination tables at low geographies are protected not by SDC methods, but by licensing and access arrangements. The precise details of this approach have not yet been finalised.

We try to use the detailed OA to OA origin :destination tables to estimate 'self containment ' patterns for migrations and travel to work patterns, to help in identifying funcitonal housing market areas. At this scale pretty well every cell is '3', which potentialy causes a lot of distortion. Common sense would suggest that longer distance moves/commutes are likely to be smaller numbers.

But if changing the disclosure rules looks like an unwinnable battle, what would help is some work to show how much distortion it actually does cause. I've experimented by changing all '3' cells to 1 or 2, to see the effect, and it is noticeable. But a check against the real numbers at different distances could perhaps give an average variation that could be applied.

The past graphs should also be replaced gradually with traditional flat versions

Sorry, No Such Document available as public

Could you list the details of the error - text or code if possible?

For example is it a page error, or has the linked seection been blocked or filtered?

For example we could use embedded Google docs, Zoho sheets, or Thinkfree.

This would allow for tabular questionnaire data to be presented in multiple graph and chart views which users can manipulate or direct download as Excel spreadsheets, and also help in capturing user responses to questionnaires.

Two such example documents are embedded below.

We know that there may be a chance that, for some users, viewing pages with embedded files may present problems becuase content from Google docs and similar sites may be blocked or filtered by their internet content restriction software or other network access restrictions.

To assess this, we would appreciate if users could scroll to view the documents below, and then reply to this message indicating if the embedded content is rendered or if it is replaced with a network filtering or error message.

That extra 'don't know' option is there now - if it does not appear then just refresh the page and it should be OK.

Any thoughts/ comments welcome

My guess is that for most people in a home \ school based role that a NeSS like website will provide what is required. For greater access of data a NOMIS approach for users who want more data and less analysis \ mapping. Over this will be those who want the census output in bulk and little extra.

Whether you agree with my conclusion about groupings and requirements, there does require a clarity when researching the requirements, of who the answer is aimed at, in order that the question can be properly asked of and targeted at the appropriate responder

There is also a desperate need to tweak Output Area boundaries so that they are recognisable on the ground: that they run along the centre of roads and streams, face of fences and walls, between boundary stones, etc. This is for the most part technically achievable: the anomalous parts of OAs generally contain no residential properties; anomalous OA boundaries rarely pass through them. Snapping to physical features in this way would be worth the effort (if not the spurious expense of commercial charges by Ordnance Survey and the Royal Mail) and would greatly increase the acceptability of census data to general users.

i.e.

'f you like a page then rate it, if not then don't'

rather than approach with a less postive view of adding negative ratings.

So, if a page rating is above zero, then in theory it should be useful.

If there is strong opinion that is widely shared that applying negative ratings as well offers more, then we can change this.

Therefore as raised at the last (joint) advisory group meeting this should not be used as a reason to cut down on the large number of datasets provided as a standard ouptut.

In the meantime the pages don't always seem to load properly, so it becomes hard to read. To add this comment took more than one attempt. At the first attempt the add comment produced a javascript problem (sorry it didn't give any codes etc).

Too much seems to need knowledge, a silly example being in this case to add a comment, I had to first 'show comments', not intuitive.

It does seem strange that ratings can only be +ve, why?

I don't mean to speak for Rob, but as we are probably in the Xmas break period, I'll pinch hit for a quick answer.

As noted, this is a work in progress, and really just a quick initial listing to open a framework upon which to develop this section of the wiki - much like all of the other headline wiki sections.

Please feel free to edit and add content to this area if you have some detailed content you feel is valuable for further contributions from other users.

KISS would be well worth incroporating into the plans. Keep it Simple S…. Instead of trying to handle each new approach sort out the basics first then add extras on top if requred.

I understand hypercubes to be a format for storing multidimensional data, of which the census is a perfect example: "age x sex x ethnicity x place of residence" is four-dimensional data. It is easy to see how the number of dimensions that anyone would want to analyse can be extended further.

For the 1991 Census output, there was a convenient piece of software available that could swivel the tables to display any three of up to fifteen dimensions at a time (from 5 columns x 5 rows x 5 pages) and produce charts: Lotus Improv, no longer in the shops or given technical support and way out of date. MS Excel pivot tables will do this to some extent, but nowhere near as elegantly.

There would seem to be a commercial opportunity over the next two or three years for someone (perhaps the SASPAC development team) to produce an updated version of Lotus Improv, cheap enough to be used by local authorities and other small-scale users. The Census Offices could then ensure their hypercubes could load directly into it.

The biggest issue was the lack of a proper CSV formatted file. ONS were able to commission a programmer to output their data in a sensible format. Unfortunately GROS were using a different version of Scrol and so were unable to make use of this. The Scottish CSV file was provided with all the geographies mixed together and was a nightmare to sort out.

Next time it would be sensible for all three census agencies to fully test the outputs with their users to ensure that this does not happen again. This issue became apparent at a very late stage which mean that remedial action became rushed or in GROS case impossible.

This will not be the case in Northern Ireland as they will be having a totally new geography.

Extra information may be also required if a postcode \ residence has moved grid reference over time due to improved mapping rather than any physical change on the ground.

Was this summary information adequate?

Is there any additional information to aid comparison between the 2001 Census and the 2011 Census that you would like to see provided for use with the next Census?

Our aim is to provide metadata that is useful and appropriate to our users. To guide us it is helpful to know what changes/new information or products would be desirable to improve on the metadata provided for the previous Census. Your opinions matter.

As always with topics on this blog, please provide any examples of websites that provide information related to the topic of discussion that you found particularly useful.

Please let us know your thoughts about training needs and census user support in general.

Asking all and sundry to comment on this subject will lead to many varied opinions.
Personally I like to read articles that have been released to the newspapers. I realise all these will be edited to show facts that the Chief editor requires.

The Census bureau should always be releasing Media faqs everyday. Rather than only when asked by the media when preparing a current news item.

The varied forms of presentations can be a simple Pie chart, a pyramid, or even a clickable Flash page (swf).

The vast majority of people would prefer an Internet based database, which might be offered in a variety of formats for the same request.

Goodluck hope you surf the web and view all the other census sites, as I did, maybe your site will be easy to navigate.

ONS has already made some progress in re-thinking how statistics can be presented for different audiences. For example, the interactive, animated population pyramid has proven popular with a wide-ranging audience. A tactile, playful approach to data presentation certainly seems to have its place. However, we are also aware that - in addition to downloading data, people might also to access data directly using Web 2.0 technologies. Such a mechanism might be useful for integrating data with data from other locations.

We are interested to hear about people's expectations of how they will access and interpet Census data. Do users want tables of data and nothing else? Or do graphs, maps and other visual mechanisms have a role to play? Do people need guidance in interpreting Census data? What about places to share stories about census data? Do you already have plans for how you would like to engage with Census data? If so, please let us know.

New regulations will come into effect for the next Census that will require the National Statistics Institutes of member states to make their data available in data cubes as specified by Eurostat. Member states have contributed to the development of these specifications. Eurostat plans to build a web portal that can access data held by those member states who have web systems that are able to exchange data automatically with other websites, and are carrying out some pilot studies.

The UK Census Offices are at an early stage in planning outputs, and the systems that will deliver them, and it is too soon for them to be involved with the pilot work or commit to developing such a system. However, we are interested in hearing about similar projects, especially those involving web access to data cubes, and learning about your experiences using web portals that access multiple web sites.

(As a reminder the survey focussed on high level issues and asked firstly about previous experience and use of census data and secondly about high level requirements for 2011 census data including 2001/2011 comparisons, access and dissemination, metadata, SDC and output priorities).

The idea of access via a 'Data Lab' is a non-starter - inconvenient and slow, and completely absurd in the 21st Century!

If some are prepared for the blurring of data because of SDC at the lowest levels in order to get ease of access fine, whereas others may want the greater accuracy and are prepared to use restricted access, then also fine. I believe that some users will only be using the OA to aggregate to their own higher geographies and so are happy with the first option, whilst others will want to look at the detail and so the latter will satisfy them.

I don’t see that this would undermine SDC and would give users the choice to meet their needs.

If we are not careful there is a possibility with all of these consultations that we will be fixing the problems of the last census. The census agencies hear from those who were dissatisfied, but those who were happy will not be commenting. I would not be at all surprised if this was one of these situations.

We are aware that users were very unhappy about the effects of the late addition of Small Cell Adjustment in the 2001 Census, particularly to tables with low counts such as the OA level Origin/destination tables which resulted in users reporting that such outputs were “unfit for purpose”. Whichever SDC method is applied the data quality of sparse tables are going to be disproportionately affected. For these types of tables we are considering the option of applying lower levels of SDC and making the output available to users only under special licence or accessed in data labs with outputs checked prior to removal. For example, some outputs from the Origin/Destination tables could be made available publicly at Super Output Area (SOA)/Data Zone level, made available under licence at Output Area (OA) level, and allow users interested in specific journeys access to detailed micro-data in a safe setting.

What would you feel about access arrangements such as this?