AN ONLINE service that aims to give businesses, policymakers and members of the public instant access to easily digestible statistical data about Ireland was unveiled yesterday.
The decisionmap.ie website is a combination of statistics already available through sources including the Central Statistics Office and the All Island Research Observatory laid over a combination of different maps.
Users can find information on how many people walk or bike to work in different areas of the country, for example, or which counties have the highest concentrations of third-level degree graduates, or even the areas with the most children.
By illustrating this information over maps by county and electoral district, “you can see a lot more, you can intuit a lot more, and take action”, said Gabrielle Stafford of web company Twelve Horses, which has developed the project with Ordnance Survey Ireland (OSI) over the past six months.
Hugh Mangan of OSI said the concept behind the website was data should drive good decisions. “It’s called decision map because that’s what we want you to use it for,” Mr Mangan said, adding everyone could profit from a better understanding of data.
Ms Stafford and Mr Mangan said they were expecting a broad audience for the site, including academics, teachers, researchers and students.
However, Ms Stafford said the company was targeting decision-makers across the private and public sector, and that their interaction and needs would be crucial in deciding how the website developed.
She said this evolutionary approach could see the feedback of decision-makers holding more weight than that of other users.
It is envisaged decisionmap.ie will use census data released next year to allow users to examine small areas of 90 households throughout the country, as opposed to the much bigger electoral divisions.
Other plans included the ability to compare two different data sets on screen and a commercial version of the product for private data, for which clients will be charged.