Scottish Index of Multiple Deprivation via Open Data

Konrad Zdeb
March 2015

Outline

The following presentation covers the development of the Shiny Application. The presentation will focus on the following points

Background to the used data and indicators
Technology and Application Architecture
Summary

Scottish Index of Multiple Deprivation

Scottish Index of Multiple Deprivation (SIMD) is a ranked indicator that describes the quality of life in Scotland on a neighbourhood level. The indicator is updated every few years by the Scottish Government and incorporates variables corresponding to the levels of benefit dependency, educational attainment, health and other life domains. The indicator is ranked on a neighbourhood level. The map on the right shows distribution of the 2012 iteration of SIMD

plot of chunk ScotlandMap

Open Data / SPARQL

During the recent years there been a development to make more of the life outcomes data is being disseminated with use of the Open Data architecture. In R there is an abundance of tools to source the Open Data. The snippet below illustrates how the data is sourced with use of SPARQL from the Open Data Scotland project. The code is incomplete for the sake of brevity.

require(SPARQL)
endpoint <- "http://data.opendatascotland.org/sparql.csv"
query.simd <- "PREFIX stats: <http://statistics.data.gov.uk/id/statistical-geography/>
PREFIX rdfs:  ........"

Shiny Application

The benefits of the following shiny application are associated with the sourced data being sourced live and lack of need to manually download and interrogate the data files. The app delivers a high degree of interactivity and dynamically generates the required summaries.