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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.
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.
We set up one of Britain's first online recording projects (www.harlequin-survey.org) to track the spread and study the effects of an invasive alien species (IAS), the harlequin ladybird. We used this as a model to develop a recording programme for other IAS (www.nonnativespecies.org/recording/). The main areas of impact are: (i) Informing conservation policy through collecting and analysing wildlife data (e.g. GB non-natives surveillance and monitoring system stemmed from our work; long-term trends data used to address Convention on Biological Diversity targets); (ii) Utilizing `citizen science' and (iii) Changing public attitudes to IAS (e.g. by engaging the public, changing the way that IAS are recorded; educating and training the public).
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.
Targeted Projection Pursuit (TPP) — developed at Northumbria University — is a novel method for interactive exploration of high-dimension data sets without loss of information. The TPP method performs better than current dimension-reduction methods since it finds projections that best approximate a target view enhanced by certain prior knowledge about the data. "Valley Care" provides a Telecare service to over 5,000 customers as part of Northumbria Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust, and delivers a core service for vulnerable and elderly people (receiving an estimated 129,000 calls per annum) that allows them to live independently and remain in their homes longer. The service informs a wider UK ageing community as part of the NHS Foundation Trust.
Applying our research enabled the managers of Valley Care to establish the volume, type and frequency of calls, identify users at high risk, and to inform the manufacturers of the equipment how to update the database software. This enabled Valley Care managers and staff to analyse the information quickly in order to plan efficiently the work of call operators and social care workers. Our study also provided knowledge about usage patterns of the technology and valuably identified clients at high risk of falls. This is the first time that mathematical and statistical analysis of data sets of this type has been done in the UK and Europe.
As a result of applying the TPP method to its Call Centre multivariate data, Valley Care has been able to transform the quality and efficiency of its service, while operating within the same budget.
New visualisation approaches have been used to turn complex data into actionable knowledge by:
These applications of new visualisation methods have had impact on the environment, economy, defence and security, society and public debate. In each case users of our methods report on their positive impact as we help them identify visualisation possibilities, understand their data and use this knowledge to inform their activity. In many cases our work has resulted in important insights, improved exploitation of data and further investment in visualisation with organisational implications in terms of using data for intelligence.
The research improves digital data archives by embedding computation into the storage controllers that maintain the integrity of the data within the archive. This opens up a number of possibilities:
This has impact on three different classes of beneficiary:
Research carried out at the University of Leeds has been used to develop data sets that are now routinely used in offshore oil exploration to identify prospective areas faster, and with reduced cost. New techniques applied to satellite altimeter data have been used to compute gravity anomalies in marine areas with increased accuracy and reliability relative to earlier products. These anomalies have been developed during the REF period in association with a University of Leeds spin-out company (Getech) into a global data set, which has been sold and licensed extensively within the hydrocarbon exploration industry. The global data set has delivered economic and reputational benefits to Getech, and has been employed by oil companies in more than 50 exploration projects per year. Shell values the improved gravity data at $2.5M per project.
Anglia Ruskin University's Professor Bourne leads the Vision Loss Experts Group (VLEG) which is part of the Global Burden of Disease Study (GBD. Comprising 79 leading ophthalmic epidemiologists from around the world, and carried out in partnership with the World Health Organization (WHO), VLEG compiled the most up-to-date statistics ever generated on the prevalence of global blindness, facilitating the analysis of trends and risk factors, and producing detailed future projections.
VLEG data have been described as "a critical contribution to our understanding of present and future health priorities for countries and the global community" (Editor-in-Chief, The Lancet, Dec 2012). The findings have directly impacted on healthcare policymakers and professionals, charities and economic analysts, both in the UK and overseas, increasing their awareness of global eye care issues. These users have applied this increased awareness at a:
a. Global level where the data have become a significant resource in health analyses by economists and healthcare planners such as PricewaterhouseCoopers and the World Economic Forum (WEF), enabling these organisations to provide recommendations for eye-health policies and practices. These reports predict the socio-economic impact of visual impairment in the world and provide an insight into the economic return from investments in eye-health treatment programmes. These in turn have informed the development of healthcare planning nationally and internationally, including the Eye Health Strategy by Vision2020 Australia. In addition, the research findings were used by NGOs and opinion leaders in ophthalmology at the Congress of the International Agency for the Prevention of Blindness (IAPB), informing discussion of blindness prevention strategies. This led directly to the development of an Action Plan for the Prevention of Avoidable Blindness and Visual Impairment (2014-2019) by the WHO, which was endorsed by the 66th World Health Assembly. Furthermore, the World Bank, as part of its mission to alleviate poverty, has adopted the data to inform funding priorities for health care projects in developing countries.
b. National level where VLEG findings drew attention to the absence of reliable data, subsequently leading to the commissioning of a detailed countrywide National Eye Survey of Trinidad and Tobago (NESTT), worth £350,000, in order to identify and address eye-health priorities.
Founded in York in 1996, the Archaeology Data Service (ADS) has transformed how archaeological research is communicated in the UK, and impacted digital archiving throughout the world. Without the ADS, much of the fragile digital data (often the primary record of sites now destroyed) would have been lost. Instead, they are freely available to all. This impact extends across national heritage agencies, local government, commercial archaeology, and the public. Our resources are widely used with over two million page requests per month; almost half from beyond the HE sector. A recent study has concluded that the ADS is worth £5m per annum to the UK economy (Beagrie & Houghton 2013). The ADS has helped shape the digital preservation policy of English Heritage and informed practice in the United States, Australia, Canada, the Netherlands, Sweden, and Germany.