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The Scottish Longitudinal Study (SLS) is a pioneering study, combining census, civil registration, health and education data (administrative data). It has established an approach that allows the legal and ethical use of personal, sensitive information by maintaining anonymity within the data system. This approach has become a model for the national data linkage systems that are now being established across the UK. The SLS has also enabled policy analysts to monitor key characteristics of the Scottish population in particular health inequalities (alerting policy makers to Scotland's poor position within Europe), migration (aiding economic planning) and changing tenure patterns (informing house building decisions). Finally, the study has become fully embedded in Scotland's National Statistical agency, allowing it to produce new informative statistical series.
KCL research played an essential role in the development of data provenance standards published by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) standards body for web technologies, which is responsible for HTTP, HTML, etc. The provenance of data concerns records of the processes by which data was produced, by whom, from what other data, and similar metadata. The standards directly impact on practitioners and professional services through adoption by commercial, governmental and other bodies, such as Oracle, IBM, and Nasa, in handling computational records of the provenance of data.
There is growing evidence that official population statistics based on the decennial UK Census are inaccurate at the local authority level, the fundamental administrative unit of the UK. The use of locally-available administrative data sets for counting populations can result in more timely and geographically more flexible data which are more cost-effective to produce than the survey-based Census. Professor Mayhew of City University London has spent the last 13 years conducting research on administrative data and their application to counting populations at local level. This work has focused particularly on linking population estimates to specific applications in health and social care, education and crime. Professor Mayhew developed a methodology that is now used as an alternative to the decennial UK Census by a large number of local councils and health care providers. They have thereby gained access to more accurate, detailed and relevant data which have helped local government officials and communities make better policy decisions and save money. The success of this work has helped to shape thinking on statistics in England, Scotland and Northern Ireland and has contributed to the debate over whether the decennial UK Census should be discontinued.
Database and URL hijacking is a very real and damaging threat for businesses and their brands. Professor David Duce and Dr Faye Mitchell successfully partnered with Nominet, a leading internet domain registry, to help detect abuse of their WHOIS system and develop tools to better understand and deal with typosquatting. Their approach enabled improvements to Nominet's information services and practices, whilst also influencing the wider technical community. These benefits included better policing of systems, securing brands, reducing fraud and starting to get people thinking about what can be done with data to gain insights and understanding of behaviours.
Our research has enabled archaeological professional and commercial organisations to integrate diverse archaeology excavation datasets and significantly develop working practices. Commercial archaeological datasets are usually created on a per-site basis structured via differing schema and vocabularies. These isolated information silos hinder meaningful cross search and comparison. As the only record of unrepeatable fieldwork, it is essential that these data are made available for re-use and re-interpretation. As a result of the research, the Archaeology Data Service, English Heritage, the Royal Commissions on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland and Wales have published as Linked Data important excavation datasets and national vocabularies that can act as hubs in the web of archaeological data.
Open Data has lowered barriers to data access, increased government transparency and delivered significant economic, social and environmental benefits. Southampton research and leadership has led to the UK Public Data Principles, which were enshrined in the UK Government Open Data White Paper, and has led to data.gov.uk, which provides access to 10,000 government datasets. The open datasets are proving means for strong citizen engagement and are delivering economic benefit through the £10 million Open Data Institute. These in turn have placed the UK at the forefront of the global data revolution: the UK experience has informed open data initiatives in the USA, EU and G8.
Small area estimation (SAE) describes the use of Bayesian modelling of survey and administrative data in order to provide estimates of survey responses at a much finer level than is possible from the survey alone. Over the recent past, academic publications have mostly targeted the development of the methodology for SAE using small-scale examples. Only predictions on the basis of realistically sized samples have the potential to impact on governance and our contribution is to fill a niche by delivering such SAEs on a national scale through the use of a scaling method. The impact case study concerns the use of these small area predictions to develop disease-level predictions for some 8,000 GPs in England and so to produce a funding formula for use in primary care that has informed the allocation of billions of pounds of NHS money. The value of the model has been recognised in NHS guidelines. The methodology has begun to have impact in other areas, including the BIS `Skills for Life' survey.
UCL research has created a groundbreaking names classification tool for use by healthcare organisations, local government and industry. This improved the effectiveness of public service delivery to different cultural, linguistic and ethnic groups, in applications such as A&E admissions and GP referral patterns. It was used by the leading provider of commercial geodemographic segmentation of neighbourhoods as a more differentiated source of ethnicity information than Census sources alone. The public was engaged with research through popular websites and extensive media coverage, and the research has provided interactive tools through which science museums have improved public understanding of genetics and family history.
A quiet technology revolution in the UK has been changing the way that police officers on the beat and hospital nurses access and record information, using handheld electronic notebooks that bring large time and cost savings. This revolution began as a University of Glasgow research programme and led to the creation of a successful spin-out company, Kelvin Connect. Acquired in 2011 by the UK's largest provider of communications for emergency services, Kelvin Connect has grown to 30 staff. Its Pronto systems are now in use by 10% of UK police forces and nursing staff in several UK hospitals.
Coombes' research to advance spatial-analysis methodology has re-defined Travel-to-Work Areas (TTWAs) — the only official UK boundaries defined by academics — and produced three distinct strands of impact.