Background

The Bristol City Council Corporate GIS Support team is providing the council and the Bristol Partnership with an online resource to share intelligence, through maps, atlases, statistical reports and dynamic reports about life in Bristol and its neighbourhoods.

We spoke to Mark Newman, Senior GIS Analyst, Bristol City Council to find out more about the project. Mark explained that Bristol City Council initially saw the potential for InstantAtlas as a platform for geodata visualisation. The council has been a pioneer and strong advocate for digital technology and its benefits on the engagement between general public and Local Authority, and on the social, economic and cultural aspects of a connected City. Its Open Data portal has helped it to make the most of tools like InstantAtlas.

Getting started

The council identified a number of groups who were likely to be users of the service. Within the council this included analysts within the different business units, service managers as well as senior member of the council who would need to access data for strategic overview. In the wider Bristol Partnership and beyond this included charities, organisations needing evidence for funding, academics and the citizens of Bristol. To cope with the range of user skills the data visualisation had to work for people with GIS experience and those without.

Meeting the need

Users are now able to access a wide range of data through the Bristol data profiles website (http://profiles.bristol.gov.uk/). This includes Bristol statistics and census information and much of this information is used by the council as evidence on which to base its plans and policies. Indicators of quality of life in Bristol are also available. The Quality of Life in your Neighbourhood survey began in 2001 and provides an annual snapshot of quality of life in Bristol. It gives residents an opportunity to voice their opinions about quality of life issues close to their hearts. Questions are asked covering a wide variety of topics ranging from perception of crime to access to services and satisfaction with various aspects of the neighbourhood. Residents are selected at random from the electoral register. Each year between 4000 and 6000 residents respond allowing analysis to be taken down to ward level and equalities group. Indicators of Quality of life measure helps the council and its partners understand whether Bristol is becoming a more sustainable city and a better or worse place to live.Results form part of the evidence to inform service planning.

Mark believes that for the council and its partners the data profiles website is putting relevant data at fingertips of those who need it and it has been particularly useful when it has come to joint projects such as the Joint Strategic Needs Assessment (JSNA).

Mark says: “The Bristol data profiles website has been extremely useful. For example, we used to get a lot of questions about specific data sets from different users. We can now direct them to the site where they can either find what they want straight away, or they can work with existing datasets to create what they need.”

Further developments

The feedback from existing users has been very positive but Mark and the team are continually looking head. One of the challenges has been to ensure that data is presented in a format that is both comprehensible and engaging. Interaction with users and data owners will help in this respect. A number of new profiles and dynamic reports are being planned.

Key Benefits

• Managing a wide variety of statistical data from sources across the strategic partnership can be managed from a central repository.
• Users do not have to be GIS experts to understand local trends Projects like the JSNA are more easily-informed with geodata visualisation now at everyone’s fingertips
• Less time is responding to data requests from individual partners

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InstantAtlas User Conference 2012 (UK)