Interested readers may wish to go and Google the term ‘MAUP’ although a word of caution – that’s one for the geography nerds! The take away message is that census users of small area data must temper their conclusions by recognising that there is always a degree of ‘apples and oranges’ in comparability, no matter how sophisticated indonesia rcs data the approaches adopted to redress the small area comparability problem.
As the foregoing implies, UK census geographies provide a range of issues and challenges to prospective users.
Firstly, the fact that there are three separate, independent but (mostly) cooperating census agencies adds to the complexities – each has its own principal census website, its own dissemination mechanisms, its own publishing time-scales and more importantly, their own individualistic approach to data capture and output.
A significant feature that the UK Data Service census team attempts to do is to provide a single point of entry to all official census geography outputs (and for that matter all census products, not just the geographical ones) and in so doing we commit significant effort to managing and ingesting data from the various agencies, quality assuring and processing data.
An illustration of value adding by quality assuring is the issue of so called ‘sliver’ polygons – often artefacts introduced at creation time due to the semi-automatic approaches used to generate Output Areas (OAs).