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ONS Geography

ONS Geography's primary role is to provide a geographic support service to the Office for National Statistics (ONS), thus improving the quality and range of ONS outputs. Through its responsibility for a range of geographic products and involvement in inter-departmental geographic initiatives, it also provides support to National Statistics and the wider community. Based at the ONS Titchfield site in Hampshire, ONS Geography was formed in December 1999 and now has almost 60 staff.

Key Activities

  • Maintaining UK boundary intelligence - keeping records of boundaries, boundary change and area names and codes for administrative, health and other geographies.
  • Allocating area codes to UK administrative geographies.
  • Tracking changing relationships between postcodes and other geographic units.
  • Creating and supporting a number of geographic products, focusing on area names, codes and boundaries and the relationships between postcodes and other geographies.
  • Developing the ONS Geographic Referencing Infrastructure (GRI), a single central source of the information and tools ONS needs to reference its data geographically.
  • Participating in a number of central government and other national and international initiatives which aim to promote a standardised, correct and effective approach to the use of geography and geographic information in statistics.
  • Supporting the usage of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) within ONS, where they play an important and increasing role in statistical analysis and visualisation.
  • Providing geographic and GIS support to the Neighbourhood Statistics (NeSS) project.
  • Producing statistical and reference maps for ONS and other government departments, and co-ordinating the mapping which appears in ONS publications such as Regional Trends and Social Trends.
  • Researching geographic methodologies and the quality of our source geographic data, and assessing the impact of these on statistical outputs.
  • Researching possibilities for the visualisation and presentation of ONS data, including developing new techniques for cartographic and graphical display on the NS website.

ONS Geography is also currently responsible for all the material on these geography pages of the NS website, so if you have any queries or feedback, please contact us.

This page last revised: Thursday, 15 June 2006

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