Open Data

How to Estimate the diagnosis of health conditions in England

September 10, 2018 By Mike Cummins Leave a Comment

Simon has explained what we wanted to do with QOF in the previous post.

Looking at the prevalence data from the QOF files, we see the GP Code, the Indicator Group (the health condition this relates to), the number of patients on that GP’s register that have that condition, the list type and list size.

These last two fields are important – not all conditions are measured across all ages: in the example below, Chronic Kidney Disease is only counted for people over 18.

gp_code	Indicator_group	register	patient_list_type	list_size
AGP001	AF	100	TOTAL	1000
AGP001	AST	300	TOTAL	1000
AGP001	CKD	125	18OV	800

Estimating the diagnosis of health conditions in England

September 4, 2018 By Simon Whitehouse 1 Comment

Data Unlocked are working on a project with Inside Outcomes and Birmingham City University to estimate the rate of diagnosis of over twenty health conditions in England using openly available datasets. In this blog post Simon Whitehouse explains how we have made our estimations.

Earlier this year we spoke with Darren Wright of Inside Outcomes about the possibility of estimating the diagnosis of health conditions in England by area, something we were surprised wasn’t already available.

The National Health Service (NHS) do produce statistics, called Quality Outcome Framework (QOF) measures, that break down the prevalence of diagnosis of twenty five different health conditions from Atrial Fibrillation to Stroke, by GP practice.

They also produce statistics about the number of patients registered in GPs practices, broken down by the Lower Layer Super Output Area (LSOA) they live in.Continue Reading

Google Maps

March 12, 2018 By Mike Cummins Leave a Comment

I recently wanted to present crime data for Moseley on a map – something I would normally do in Tableau, but wasn’t convenient at the time.

Having visited police.uk, entered a Moseley postcode and clicked “Explore the crime map”, I downloaded the data for the previous year to date by clicking “View detailed statistics and choosing the option to “download crime data for this area as a CSV file”.

I now had a file and remembered that an infrequently used part of Google Maps is to create your own map, albeit with a limit of 2,000 features.

–read more —

Having signed into Google, I went to Google Maps and clicked the 3 parallel horizontal bars that indicate a submenu.

By clicking “Your places”, I was presented with maps that I had created in the past:

At the bottom of the list, there is an option to “CREATE MAP”, which I selected.

A clue is given to Import data onto a new (untitled) layer, which I selected.

I uploaded my Moseley Crime Data to be asked which columns contained the Latitude and Longitude. Fortunately, these columns had the same name and where already selected, so I clicked “Continue”.

I was now asked to select a column to use as titles for my markers, selecting Category.

On clicking Finish I was presented with my map:

This is a bit boring, so I chose “Uniform style” and selected “Category which colour coded the pins by crime category:

So a quick and dirty colour coded map in about 3 minutes.

Discussing council budgets at UK Gov Camp

January 23, 2018 By Simon Whitehouse Leave a Comment

UKGovCamp Word Cloud

UKGovCamp 2018

Last Saturday I attended UK Gov Camp – an event for people interested in how the public sector makes the best uses of digital technologies. It has an open format, with the agenda decided by the participants. At the start of the day everyone has the chance to stand up and “pitch” their idea for a session.

Data Unlocked are going to be data partners for The Bureau Local‘s Big Council Budget Hack which is happening at five centres around the country on Saturday, 3rd February. So, I pitched a session to discuss council budgets and what attendees thought would be useful information for members of the public and journalists attending the hack day.

The raw session notes were taken by Graeme Jones from OpenMindly. I have adapted them below to include my thoughts and to focus on just three questions that were raised.Continue Reading

The Big Council Budget Hack – West Midlands

January 19, 2018 By Simon Whitehouse Leave a Comment

We are very happy to announce that we will be The Bureau Local’s data partners for their Big Council Budget Hack – West Midlands event on Saturday 3rd February at Coventry University’s Ellen Terry Building.

This Bureau Local investigation “is bringing together budget data for each of England’s 353 councils to find out what makes the cut – and what doesn’t – ahead of the government’s next set of funding decisions in March.”

The Big Council Budget Hack – West Midlands

Open Data Manchester have the onerous task of completing a technical review of all the data beforehand. We will be on hand at the Coventry event to help people explore the data and find the answers to any questions they might have.

The sign up is on Eventbrite. If you are coming along and already know what you are interested in then please let us know in the comments and we will try and do some preparatory work beforehand.

Who Owns Birmingham? – December Event

December 15, 2017 By Simon Whitehouse 4 Comments

Image by West Midlands Police (Flickr: Can you identify this aerial shot?) [CC BY-SA 2.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

Who owns small, unloved pockets of land in Birmingham’s inner city? Why are so many properties owned by companies located at one address on Jersey? Where’s the most expensive car parking space in England and Wales? Are there a significant number of overseas companies owning land in England and Wales who also appear in the Panama and Paradise Papers?
These were just a few of the questions explored this Tuesday, 12th December by people and groups at Data Unlocked’s Who Owns Birmingham event.

This Tuesday we held our first Who Owns Birmingham event at Innovation Birmingham. This follows the Land Registry’s recent release of data about land and property ownership in England and Wales.

The release includes a little over three and a half million records of land and property in England and Wales owned by companies, local authorities, county councils and other organisations. Private individuals and charities are the two categories not published.Continue Reading

Open Data Camp – Data as Art session

November 2, 2017 By Simon Whitehouse Leave a Comment

Myself and Mike Cummins went to Belfast the other weekend for Open Data Camp 5. The following is a write up and some thoughts about the session that Amy Evans from Open Data Institute (ODI) Leeds ran on Open Data and Art.

The Session: Open Data As Art

Amy started by introducing herself. She is the social media and communications lead at ODI Leeds as well as being their go to person for visual work. She has a background in Visual Communication, specifically Illustration.

Amy highlighted the Big Bang Data exhibition at Somerset House as being an example of open data art and said that her interest in running the session was to discover other examples.Continue Reading

Birmingham’s Rubbish

February 5, 2016 By Mike Cummins Leave a Comment

Birmingham City Council recently announced that they would be “opening up the council’s vast amounts of data, so members of the public can judge our performance.”

Their first offering is a “a dashboard that outlines how well each ward is doing on some key environmental measures: litter, fly-posting and graffiti.”. This is the form of an Excel spreadsheet with a red background for those wards failing the target and a green background for those that match or better it.

The dashboard can be seen at FWM-Dashboard-1-Feb-2016.xls. Interestingly, this is not in the Open Data section of the BCC website, but a Newsroom announcement. The last place I looked…

Data for the first three maps is for February 2016. Index of Multiple Deprivation is for October 2015.

Litter

Flyposting

Graffiti

Indices of Multiple Deprivation (Red to Green)

The Balkanisation of Data

July 31, 2015 By Mike Cummins Leave a Comment

As regular readers of this blog will know, I have recently been trying to get historical data for the West Midlands primarily prompted by the National Trust app [https://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/visit/places/find-a-place-to-visit/mobile-apps/] crashing whenever I try and use it (on multiple Android devices).

I was also somewhat interested in the data that Historic England [http://www.historicengland.org.uk/listing/the-list] (English Heritage as was) provided as a supplementary source of information for any app that I developed.

I approached the National Trust (henceforth NT) to receive the following reply:

“I’m sorry but we don’t hold a full listing of our places, the only info we have is what is currently available on the Land Map.”.

Astonishing. Unfortunately, as the National Trust is a charity, they do not need to submit to FOI requests, so I next looked at Wikidata. This only contains 332 out of 525 NT properties – at least under the name used by the National Trust…

In the mean time I had been in contact with Historic England and received two files, which I merged but when I tried to combine the NT places with the HE data I found that NONE of my data matched. I was missing the NT data from the HE file(s).

As a new avenue I decided to try and get the data for the Heritage Environment Records (the Sites and Monuments Records [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sites_and_monuments_record] as was) and found the gateway at http://www.heritagegateway.org.uk/Gateway/CHR/. Responsibility is the held (mainly) by the Local Authority, so for the West Midlands I would need to combine data from Birmingham, Coventry, Dudley, Herefordshire, Sandwell, Shropshire, Solihull, Staffordshire, Stoke-on-Trent, Warwickshire, Wolverhampton, Walsall,
Worcester City, and Worcestershire.

So a mere 17 sources of information – just for the West Midlands. I find it astonishing that there is no single place this is held. I feel a project coming on…

Ask nicely!

June 26, 2015 By Mike Cummins Leave a Comment

Simon and I have had a busy couple of days presenting the “Realising the value of data” sessions at the Greater Birmingham Digital Academy Summer School where we explained some of the different ways you can get data from organisations, to which I added this one.

I have a long standing passion for historic buildings and was interested to find that Historic England (English Heritage, as was) provide a data download. I grabbed this (see my previous post) , but was somewhat frustrated to find that the Asset Name was (no doubt due to “historic” reasons) sometimes something like “2-3”. Although an Easting and Northing was also supplied, I couldn’t think of an easy way to convert those to an address.

I emailed them to ask if any further information was available and, somewhat to my surprise, their Mapping and Spatial Analysis Officer replied to me. After a bit of discussion, he agreed to do an extract for the West Midlands and the following day I received two files containing a lot more data.

A swift merge using Google Fusion Tables, and I had a file that already had the Latitude and Longitude and contained much better data.

The moral is “Ask nicely”.