Geographic Information Systems (GIS) are tools used for the storage, manipulation, visualisation and analysis of datasets that have an element of geography, usually using a map to visualise this. In the public sector GIS have been used for a number of years in areas such as Highways, Planning and Property. However in more recent years they have been used increasingly in other areas, including Education, Housing, Fire, Health, Command & Control, Crime Analysis, Socio-Economic studies, and many more.

The result of this activity is that a number of agencies are now producing a range of geographically referenced data for their own use, and are increasingly sharing it with partner agencies.

To expand on the work of these agencies, and to coordinate the collation of this data into one place for the first time, the Observatory intends to use GIS at the core of its data sharing activities. GIS are important in that geography may be the only common relationship between one dataset and another, yet the theme of one may be related to the environmental factors in another in a given area.

Coordinating the data sharing will provide an efficient way of obtaining such data. More importantly, however, it will also allow practitioners to work together to understand more fully the impact of their work on each other and the citizens. The data will be used to influence policy creation and decision making not only within the individual agencies, but in more formal areas of joint working including the Cumbria Strategic Partnership, Local Area Agreement, the Every Child Matters agenda, and the Crime & Disorder Reduction Partnerships.

The outcome will therefore be an improvement in service delivery across the board, through more effective targeting of the citizens and areas of Cumbria which are the most needy.

Possible examples of analysis in Cumbria using the Observatory data could be:

• Reducing malicious fires created by young people in Workington by comparing point locations of fires from the fire service with the provision of youth facilities from the district council, and levels of deprivation from the Office of National Statistics. 
• Using GIS to compare road traffic accident locations in Kendal with road conditions from the County highways and accident admissions from the NHS. 
• Analysing Key Stage educational attainment in Carlisle by Super Output Area instead of school catchment area, allowing correlation with youth crime rates from the police and data from the Youth Offending Service. 
• Promoting new business start-ups in Barrow using Employment Land Availability from the County Council, household and employer survey data from the Learning & Skills Council, with household income levels from Paycheck. 
• Researching the rates of looked after adults in Whitehaven from the County Council with levels of sickness benefit claimants from the Department of Work and Pensions, with long term illness rates from the Primary Care Trust.     

Key suppliers of data to the Observatory will be the County Council, District Councils, NHS and Emergency Services as well as regional and national agencies such as the Office of National Statistics (ONS), North West Development Agency, and so on. 

In the longer term the list of contributors could be expanded to include not only additional public bodies but also the private and voluntary sectors. The Observatory also intends to encourage all the agencies involved to improve the quality of their existing data, and develop new GIS datasets for both their own and partners’ use.

The Land & Property Gazetteer

The introduction of the LPG as the common address dataset across participating agencies will provide further opportunities for analysis by allowing individual data records from different systems to be linked together through a common address. The Gazetteer will also bring a more accurate level of geography to these systems, some for the first time. This will provide additional flexibility in the analysis of data at more resolute and non-standard geographies, for example Output Area or Police Beat respectively. The LPG is also updated on a daily basis, providing these systems with the most current address data available.