The SASPAC Advisory Panel recently wrote to the Registrar Generals of Scotland and Northern Ireland requesting a coordinated technical approach to the delivery of UK 2011 Census Outputs. ONS are already committed to building an Application Programming Interface (API) that allows SASPAC (and others) to directly search and query the ONS datastore. However, for users to be able to query UK-wide data, GROS and NISRA will need to deliver data using a similar mechanism.
Responses from both Offices confirmed their commitment to deliver “consistent, coherent and accessible statistics” and an intention to “provide a feed of census data to ONS for inclusion in a consolidated UK census database” but no plans to develop their own external API. This may not cause any major problems…as long as they both provide all the data for ONS to push out using their API?
SASPAC 