OSi and CSO launched new website giving raw data access to the Public

By Oscar Michel, Masters in Journalism, DCU

Ordnance Survey Ireland (OSi) and the Central Statistics Office (CSO) have launched a new website available here on ESRI Ireland’s digital mapping platform.

Esri Ireland specialises in the application of geographic information systems, helping customers record where things happen and analyse why, with the aim of providing insight and helping them to make better decisions.

By using this website, users have access to raw data that they can manipulate, filter or even combine multiple datas to create their own infographics and maps. The users can then download their work and open it in their own softwares and apps or connect to it via a series of Open Standards APIs. All data on the site is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution version 4.0 CC-BY in line with Open Data best practice.

Data from Census 2016 is now opened to the public and consequently the Census 2016 Small Area Statistics (SAPS) has been online since the 20th July.

“This website is a powerful tool that provides public sector decision-makers and civil society groups with access to comprehensive data about population demographics in Ireland. As well as this, as this site is open to the public it will enable people who have taken the time to fill in their census forms to explore the results, and learn more about their areas and population trends in Ireland on the whole” said Eamonn Doyle, CTO of ESRI Ireland.

This project will make geographical and statistical information much more accessible. The information will reach a greater audience like the public sector decision makers or the members of the public. Data from Census 2016 can now be visualised in map form across 31 Administrative Counties, 95 Municipal districts, 3,409 Electoral Divisions and 18,641 Small Areas.

The website was built by OSi using ESRI Ireland’s ArcGIS Open Data platform. ArcGIS is the world’s fastest growing Open Data platform with 4270 implementations serving almost 75,000 data sets. This new site will provide public policy makers, researchers, academics and public stakeholders with access to over 500 layers of authoritative OSi boundary data that has been enriched with 2016 Census statistics provided by the CSO.

This project has the ambition of creating a new data infrastructure that will facilitate evidence based decision making across the public sector.

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