Summary of the impact

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.

Summary of the impact

The Statistical Cybermetrics Research Group (SCRG) has developed web-based indictors and methods for use in research policy and research evaluation for governmental bodies and non- governmental organisations. The research has impact by providing tools and new types of indicators for policy-relevant evaluations for policy makers and decision makers. The research itself includes (a) the direct production and implementation of new indicators and (b) theoretical research into indicator foundations and tool performance, such as that of the web search engines used for indicator construction. The research has impact on policy making within the United Nations Development Programme by aiding evaluations of its initiatives, and within Oxfam and the BBC World Service Trust. It has impact on policy making at the national and international levels to aid the effective directing of funding to aid knowledge production. It has also has impact on public services by helping Nesta and Jisc to evaluate the success of some of their initiatives.

Summary of the impact

The Great Britain Historical Geographical Information System (GBHGIS) has computerised geographical surveys of Britain, including Ordnance Survey mapping and all censuses 1801-1971, integrating them into a consistent, innovative geo-spatial and geo-semantic information architecture, and disseminated data via many channels including the UK Data Service, direct work for government agencies (e.g. DEFRA, National Archives), and our own very popular web sites that are used extensively by genealogists and the general public with over 1.8 million unique users per annum. Impact of the technical innovation is mainly on non-UK academics, but within the UK we have made it vastly easier to place modern local issues in long-run perspective — and lots of people and organisations have.

Summary of the impact

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.

Summary of the impact

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.

Summary of the impact

Two Knowledge Transfer Partnership projects, carried out between 2006 and 2009, between an e-commerce marketplace provider (@UK plc) and the University of Reading, led to the development of two software tools that were launched in 2010. The tools, SpendInsight and GreenInsight, are the first of their kind to use artificial intelligence techniques to handle the extremely challenging data associated with purchasing in large organisations. Since their launch, these tools have been used by @UK plc to identify procurement savings and environmental costs of procurement activities for governments, multi-national corporations, academic institutions and healthcare providers. Over the last three years @UK plc has benefitted from the launch of these products as it has provided them with a competitive advantage over the market place, increased the quality and efficiency of their spend analyses and led to multi-million pound licensing agreements. An analysis of spending in some of the NHS Trust Foundations has led to changes in procurement behaviours that have resulted in hundreds of thousands of pounds saved to date — benefitting not only the NHS, but also taxpayers.

Summary of the impact

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.

Summary of the impact

Aston University researchers developed and maintain the Uncertainty Markup Language (UncertML) for quantitative specification and interoperable communication of uncertainty measures in the Web. It is the only complete mechanism for representation of uncertainty in a web context. UncertML has been:

- Used in policy and decision making by UK (Food and Environment Research Agency) and international (European Commission) government agencies, and many research / industrial institutes;

- Presented at industrial /technical workshops, leading to ongoing international collaborations with bodies such as national space agencies (ESA and NASA) and government data providers;

- Accepted as a discussion paper for formal standardisation by the Open Geospatial Consortium;

- Chosen by independent data providers for efficient sharing of complex information and rigorous risk analysis across scientific domains such as pharmacy, global soil mapping and air quality.

Summary of the impact

Researchers in the Organisations, Information and Knowledge (OAK) group have developed technologies for large-scale acquisition, integration and sense-making of information acquired from a variety of sources, including textual documents, the Web and multiple devices. These technologies have had:

1. Economic impact in form of two University spin-out companies, created in order to exploit them: K-Now Ltd, who use the technologies to support knowledge management in large enterprises and social media monitoring for emergency response, and The Floow Ltd, who use the technologies to power organisational intelligence in, e.g. telematics-based motor insurance.
2. Economic impact in the large enterprises and their supply chain that have adopted them. [text removed for publication] have adopted the technologies as the core component of a knowledge management programme focusing on data mining thousands of documents that has saved millions and been delivered to thousands of engineers; Direct Line are offering driver- behaviour-based motor insurance to [text removed for publication] customers based on the technologies.
3. Public service impact by using them for social media monitoring to deliver improved civil monitoring and protection services for hundreds of thousands of people, e.g. at large public festivals [text removed for publication], and for river flood monitoring.

Summary of the impact

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.