Geo-statistics: a partnership between the geospatial and the statistical community

Geo-statistics:a partnership between the geospatial

and the statistical community

Gabriella Vukovich,President of HCSO (Hungary), Acting Chair of UNSC

IAOS 2014 Conference on Official Statistics Meeting the demands of a changing world

8-10 October 2014 Da Nang, Viet NamTheme 3: Building partnerships to enhance the value of official statistics:

Towards a global statistical - geospatial framework

Clusters of cholera cases, London epidemic, 1854

John Snow memorial:the Broad(wick) Street well

Ebola, 2013-2014• In a study

published last month, Gomes et al. used a data-driven global stochastic and spatial epidemic model for the quantitative analysis of the risk of international spread of the EVD 2014WA outbreak.

From census cartography to geostatistics• Census cartography since the 19th century – delineation of enumeration districts,

presentation of data at various subnational (later cross-country) levels

• Gradual change in users’ needs: recognition of the value of linking socio-economic information to location for understanding causal relationships, for evidence-based decision-making, for improving the lives of people

Increasing demand for information linked to location about people, health, wellbeing, businesses, economic performance and potential, environment, risks, hazards, sustainable development etc.

• Availability of new and enhanced methodologies and infrastructure to produce information at very granular levels

• Result: combining statistics with geospatial information creates unprecedented analytic potential

Partners and Stakeholders

• Active partners• UN Global Geospatial Information Management (UN GGIM) Committee of

Experts• UN Statistical Commission• Regional GGIM structures• National initiatives

• Beneficiaries• Users of information• The partnerships will enable statisticians and researchers to produce fit for

purpose results; ultimately people will benefit from better research outcomes and more targeted decisions due to innovations and improvements in data and information technology

International coordination efforts• Creation of UN GGIM (starting with informal consultation in 2009): UN

Committee on Global Geospatial Information Management• Creation by UNSC and UN-GGIM of the United Nations Expert Group on the

Integration of Statistical and Geospatial Information; Co-Chairs: Peter Harper (Australia) and Rolando Ocampo (Mexico); 1st meeting 30 Oct-1 Nov 2013, NY• Since 2010, each session of the UN Statistical Commission discussed a report

on geospatial information, more recently on the integration of statistical and geospatial information• International workshop on integrating geospatial and statistical information

(June 2014, Beijing)• Global Forum on the integration of statistical and geospatial infromation

(August 2014, New York)

Regional GGIM structures

• UN GGIM ̶ Asia-Pacific• UN GGIM ̶ Americas• UN GGIM ̶ Arab States• UN GGIM ̶ Europe (first meeting: Chisinau, Moldova, 1 October 2014)• UN GGIM ̶ Africa

UNSC - ABS global programme review - Backround

• UN SG noted that a better integration of statistics with geospatial information is crucial for sound and evidence based decision-making• Users of statistics: Increasing demand for location linked information, to better understand

issues at local levels and interrelationships between social, environmental and economic issues

• Users of geospatial information: Recognition that using socio-economic information adds value to the traditional focus of the geospatial community on natural and man-made environment

• Geospatial information can be the link that enables the integration of location based information derived from various disparate sources

• ABS undertook to conduct a programme review on behalf of the UNSC to identify• the geospatial capabilities and activities of NSOs• existing cooperation between NSOs and national geospatial authorities• institutional arrangements for the collaboration of between NSOs and geospatial agencies

Programme review – main findings• Drivers

• policies with people in the focus (health, education, social welfare)• urban planning, land administration• emergency management, national security• increasing interest from researchers, businesses and the general public

• Spatial capabilities in NSOs• significant diversity in capabilities and wide range of levels of engagement• recognition of the need for georeferenced statistics• recognition of the benefits of location linked statistics (e.g. more focused policies and responses,

identifying patterns that are not easily seen without location based information)

• Institutional arrangements – strong predictors of the ability to integrate statistics and geospatial information• fully integrated• separate but closely linked• separate

• Geographic boundaries used by statisticians• currently mostly administrative boundaries, with some functional geographies and grid-based systems

Programme review – recommendations

• Establish an Expert Group with a view to developing a global framework, and propose guidelines to advance the implementation of the global framework• Convene an international conference on the integration of statistical

and geospatial information ( Global Forum 2014)• Promote the creation of formalised cooperation linkages between

statistical and geospatial organisations

First Global Forum on the Intagration of Statistical and Geospatial Information, (4-5 August 2014, NY)

• Background: both UNSC and UN-GGIM expressed the need • to integrate statistics and geospatial information and• to develop a statistical-geospatial framework as a global standard for the integration of

statistical and geospatial information

• Objectives of the Global Forum• To develop a strategic vision and goals for the integration of statistical and geospatial

information by bringing together statisticians and representatives of the geospatial agencies to a common platform

• To better understand emerging agendas (e.g. the Post-2015 Development Agenda, the 2020 Round of Population Censuses, a global map for sustainable development) and their information needs

• To jointly set the direction for technical capacity development• To jointly acknowledge the importance of the integration of statistical and geospatial

information to give authority to international collaboration efforts at the operational and technical level

• To discuss a mechanism, such as a global statistical geospatial framework, to facilitate consistent production and integration approaches for geo-statistical information

Key messages• Institutional coordination and cooperation between statistical and geospatial agencies is a

prerequisite of the consistent integration of statistical and geospatial information• Institutional coordination and cooperation requires strong political commitment• Urgent need for a global statistical-geospatial framework to facilitate the consistent production

and release of geostatistics that will support of more robust decision-making at subnational (local), national, regional and global levels – national efforts are on the way, their streamlining is needed

• Develop, adopt and implement common terminologies, technical standards, metadata and share agreed protocols

• Integration of statistical and geospatial and big data as well as other non traditional sources of data is necessary to fulfil user needs

• Adding geospatial capability to statistics requires the codification of location attributes linked to socio-economic information

• Share experience about geocoding address information in the data management system of NSOs• Granularity vs privacy – confidentiality has to be observed as data are detailed at smaller and

smaller geographic levels; legislative and methodological development necessary

Levels and types of parnerships

• Establishing frameworks of cooperation• UN GGIM – UNSC• national statistical offices – national geospatial information authorities• Other public – public partnerships• Partnerships between public institutions and businesses• Multilateral partnerships

• Creating the conditions of integrating statistics and geospatial information• Legislation• Resource allocation• Standardisation, frameworks, methodologies• Share good practices• Continued availability of geospatial and big data – flexibility of official statistics and of

geostatistics production in case data sources fade away

Challenges• Cost of IT and statistical infrastructure investments, software development• Operational cost of generating robust, internationally comparable small

area data • Data fusion – integrating data from different and often incongruous sources• Limited geospatial capability in many NSOs, limited statistical capability in

national geospatial agencies• Cooperation mechanisms between various actors involved (official

statistics, owners of administrative data, owners of big data, national geospatial authorities) are not yet well established in many countries• . . .

Opportunities• 2020 Round of Censuses offers an opportunity to enhance geospatial capabilites of

NSOs• Post 2015 development agenda: the Data Revolution concept around the emerging

SDGs calls for robust data at very granular levels of geography• Use these opportunities to build a common linking approach to realise the full

potential of the benefit of linking statistics and geospatial information• consistency and comparability across countries and within countries• an internationally consistent approach can lead to the shared development of IT tools and

applications

• Spread existing national good practices (e.g. ABS Statistical Spatial Framework which builds on the National Address Management Framework; Hungary is building something similar)• Infrastructure transformation in NSOs offers an opportunity to incorporate

geospatial linkage• Capacity building in NSOs and geospatial agencies

Thank you for listening.

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