Google Fusion Tables

A short post today about the wonderful Google Fusion Tables. It may sound baffling, but Fusion Tables are basically a service (provided by Google, obviously) that allows you to manage and map large databases 'in the cloud', as they say. In plain speak, you can upload large tables of data and display them and map them and share them. For someone like me who is into mapping data, this is great because all you need to do is get your data into kml format. This can be done with normal GIS software like ArcGIS but the best way I have found is to use shpescape.



The example above is just something I created a couple of years ago in ArcGIS and then recently uploaded to Fusion Tables. It's a 'tile finder' for Ordnance Survey data so you can figure out which 20km tile you need to get based on which area you are interested in. This is not the point here though - I'm just showing how you can get data into google map format very easily.

If you work with lots of data on a regular basis - and particularly any mappable data - you should take a look at Fusion Tables...

The IMD in 3D

Before I move on from experimenting with the deprivation data from the new English Indices of Deprivation I thought I'd do a 3D version, just for fun. The images below are the results of my experiments. The first image has labels for various places. The second image does not and is also at a higher resolution.



When you add a third dimension certain places stand out more (e.g. coastal areas) but there is a balance to be struck here, as always... That's enough IMD mapping for now!

The Domains of the IMD

What most people look at when they see the Indices of Deprivation is the combined Index of Deprivation score and rank for each area. I do this too, but it's always interesting to examine the individual domains to see how areas rank and what the spatial patterns look like. So, time for a map on all of this... (click to enlarge)

In the above image, you'll see that I've produced a raster map for each of the different domains of the English IMD 2010 and that each is sized according to the percentage weighting it gets in the final IMD. There are some interesting differences between domains which, by the way, are covered in Chapter 3 of the technical report.

Income and employment account for nearly half of the weighting for the final IMD score so these maps look pretty similar to the overall IMD map but there are interesting differences with other domains, in particular Barriers to Housing and Services. This picks up a lot of rural areas but also many in London and some other urban locations. Health deprivation and disability also differs from the final IMD map with a more obvious north-south / coalfield pattern. Finally, the most deprived LSOA on each domain is as follows...

• Income: E01005482 in the Central and Falinge ward of Rochdale
• Employment: E01005482 in the Central and Falinge ward of Rochdale
• Health and Disability: E01005482 in the Central and Falinge ward of Rochdale
• Education, Skills and Training: E01013640 in the Braunstone Park ward of Leicester
• Barriers to Housing and Services: E01000604 in the Stonebridge ward of Brent
• Crime: E01005454 in the Waterhead ward of Oldham
• Living Environment: E01001780 in the Hoxton ward of Hackney

The fact that these domains are in different spreadsheets makes mapping it all a bit more time-consuming but since I combined them all anyway I decided to create raster versions just to provide a more fluid overview of the patterns across England. I'm sure I'll keep milking this data for a while!

Scottish Index of Multiple Deprivation 2009 - Google Map

Recently I've been experimenting with google fusion tables and the mapping and database opportunities they present. One dataset I used for this was the new English Indices of Deprivation for 2010 - something the Guardian picked up. This was only really a quick experiment (literally done over an hour or so) but I was impressed with the capabilities.

Since, I'm from Scotland I also did a Scottish version - click the image below to go to the test site. Again, this is only experimental but I find it useful for exploring the data in an easy to use manner.

Technical note: this also led me to discover the amazing shpescape aka Shape to Fusion for converting shapefiles to fusion format - code which was written by Josh Livni at google. Enough nerdspeak for now.

English Indices of Deprivation 2010 - A North-South Divide?

I've been looking at the new Indices of Deprivation a bit more since my last post. Despite the headline-grabbing fact that England's most deprived area is in Essex - in the south of England - the overall patterns remain dominated by the North. This map highlights the least and most deprived areas in England and also notes some important exceptions (click map for full size image)...


I've also put together an animation showing the 1%, 2%, 3%, etc. most deprived areas all the way up to the 10% most deprived - and then the 10% least deprived (as in the map above) in order to demonstrate the general north-south divide. Notice how the cities of Liverpool and Manchester in particular dominate these patterns. If you want to control the animation, you can hit pause then move the slider along the time bar yourself (the video may take a moment to load).



This version is just a small blog size version - I've also posted a larger version on my University of Sheffield pages. So, in contrast to the headlines, it seems clear that deprivation remains more firmly entrenched in the north than in the south (with some exceptions of course).

Indices of Deprivation 2010

The English Indices of Deprivation 2010 were published this morning. Previous Indices were published in 2000, 2004 and 2007. I've decided to do a few posts on this because I find it very interesting and it does have real implications in relation to policy. In this post, I've done some basic mapping and analysis (click on any map to view it full size).

A quick snapshot first: the most deprived LSOA is in Tendring, Essex. It used to be in Liverpool. Overall, Liverpool, Middlesbrough, Manchester, Knowsley, Hull, Hackney and Tower Hamlets remain the most deprived local authorities. So, no major surprises.

Overview for the whole of England, with a list of top ten most deprived LSOAs.


Overview cartogram for England, with a list of top ten most deprived LSOAs.


Detailed map showing location of the most deprived LSOA in England.


A zoomable google map version of the above, for good measure.

View Tendring 018A in a larger map

A more focused map of Merseyside, showing Liverpool, Sefton and Knowsley.

Note: The Indices of Deprivation 2010 are produced for small areas called LSOAs. These lower layer super output areas are not 'neighbourhoods' in a formal sense but they often have a high degree of internal similarity. The average population of an LSOA is about 1500 and in total there are 32,482 of them in England. The data used in the Indices are mostly from 2008 but you can read more about this in the technical report.

World Population and Projections

I've been thinking about the future a lot recently because I've been working on a proposal involving scenarios and visions for the future of Europe. So, time to post a couple of things on population change and projections. The first thing is that if you type 'world population' into google, you'll get the following results:

Clicking on the graphic will take you to the google chart where you can turn different countries on and off by ticking the boxes. This makes it easy to compare data on population change from 1960 to 2009 (as below).

The data are from the World Development Indicators of The World Bank. But what if you want to know about the future. Well, there are lots of projections for different countries, but I don't think there are any that go as far as the 2004 report from the United Nations, entitled World Population 2300. Yes, the year 2300.

This is a 254 page report by the Economic and Social Affairs division and they firsst consider projections to 2050 and discuss assumptions and long-range possibilities. Part 2 looks at different scenarios and different areas of the world (e.g. Oceania). Other parts look at country rankings, population density and ageing. The world population projection for 2300 is projected to be about 9 billion. This has already been covered in a Worldmapper map, so no map here. That's all for now...