Local 1229611962|%e %b %Y, %H:%M %Z|agohover
Mention was made at an early stop on the roadshow of the requirement by Eurostat for census output to be available in hypercube format. Good news!
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columns x 5 rows x 5 pages) and produce charts: Lotus Improv, no longer in the shops or given technical support and way out of date.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.
