Volunteered Geographic Information

I have recently been made secretary of the Output Area Classification User Group (OACUG), a research group based at the Royal Statistical Society (RSS). This is a second role to complement my position as Postgraduate Representative of the Quantitative Methods Research Group (QMRG) at the Royal Geographical Society (RGS). My colleague Alex Singleton has also been made chair of the OACUG.

The Output Area Classification (OAC) is a geodemographic classification, meaning that it is a system for characterising the type of people that live in a given area based upon their demographic data from the 2001 census. There are 3 hierarchical levels to OAC, consisting of 7 groups at the top, 21 at the middle and 52 at the bottom level. The intent of OAC is to provide a simple and general measure of ‘neighbourhood type’. The scale at which OAC is reported is Output Area (OA) which is an areal unit that contains roughly 125 households.

A good visualisation of OAC exists at on the London Profiler site.

Further information at the OACUG and QMRG.