Welcome to the latest InstantAtlas News. In this month’s edition we focus on UK Local Government clients:-

1. CLIENT EXAMPLES

• 1.1 Client Spotlight:  Worcestershire County Council | Building Area Profiles for Elected Members
• 1.2 Client Spotlight: Nottingham City Council | Tracking Neighbourhood Change in Nottingham
• 1.3 Client Spotlight: West Midlands Regional Observatory | State of the Region Reporting
• 1.4 Client Spotlight: North Yorkshire County Council | New interactive Neighbourhood Profiles
  

2. RESOURCES & NEWS

• 2.1 New Local Observatory / LIS demonstration site
• 2.2 New demos published to illustrate the capabilities of our templates
  
• 2.3 Local Economic Monitor (LEM) – latest updates
• 2.4 West Midlands Regional Observatory New Recession Monitoring Reports
  
• 2.5 InstantAtlas demos by theme
• 2.6 Staying in touch with InstantAtlas
• 2.7 UK LIS Workshops Feb 2010 – dates for the diary
• 2.8 UK LIS Data & Report Packs update – The Economic Assessment Duty Pack
  

3. PRODUCT NEWS

• 3.1 Area Profile Template version 6.3 – new features coming soon
  

1. CLIENT EXAMPLES

1.1 Worcestershire County Council | Building Area Profiles for Elected Members

The Worcestershire County Council Research & Intelligence Unit are using InstantAtlas Server to deliver a corporate Local Information System (LIS).  As part of this work they have built a rich set of Ward Profile reports aimed at, amongst others, elected members.  They include sections on the relevant local councillor, population, crime, economy, health, children, and place survey results.  One-click links to these reports have been published as a simple list on their intranet site (not currently publicly available).

Click to see larger image

Innovative follow-up work is on-going to incorporate data from their central contact centre on the number and type of phone enquiries.  Postcode-tagged enquiries around issues like road maintenance problems, refuse collection and council tax are aggregated to neighbourhood and higher level geographies and then loaded into their LIS for reporting purposes.  Reports of “most frequently asked questions” can then be presented to councillors in the form of profiles and thematic maps via the council intranet.  This opens up all sorts of options, for example, to better understand neighbourhoods that appear to have high levels of enquiries regarding specific problem issues.  Users can visualise neighbourhoods of specific geo-demographic types that have high or low levels of enquiries and whether there are actions that can be taken to target interventions and provide smarter approaches to council communications.

David Onions, Acting Head of Research & Intelligence, comments: “Instant Atlas server is a very cost effective solution for presenting geographical data in an easily accessible format.  Worcestershire County Council is currently taking advantage of this to support our Elected Members in being even more informed about their local areas, by means of providing them with a profile of their electoral division and details of the services requests residents have made to our customer service centre.”

If you want to see the sort of profile reports (like the ones above) that can be developed and published with InstantAtlas Server try our Local information Systems demonstration application – use the clickable map of Nottingham Wards for instant access to reports.

1.2 Client Spotlight: Nottingham City Council | Tracking Neighbourhood Change in Nottingham

Nottingham City Council has recently started a project to understand how they can support a requirement to evaluate and monitor regeneration activities within the City. The main objective of this project is to develop a tool to deliver evidence of social, economic and environmental change over time in relation to investment, providing a holistic approach to regeneration and enabling the monitoring of outcomes at a local level. – To read more download the PDF case study

1.3 Client Spotlight: West Midlands Regional Observatory | State of the Region Reporting

West Midlands Regional Observatory has produced  a new set of InstantAtlas reports to support its State of the Region 2009 Project with the aim of assisting policy makers to explorer research with highly-interactive maps. The report brings together some of the key evidence from the State of the Region dialogues, a new process started in 2008, with a range of other information about the major issues facing the West Midlands. WMRO has linked the themes to wider developments influencing regional policy and strategy. Excel datasets of indicators and the data can be explored in interactive maps covering areas such as local economy, population & health, community & culture and environment & transport

More about this project »

1.4 Client Spotlight: North Yorkshire County Council | New interactive Neighbourhood Profiles

North Yorkshire County Council (NYCC) has recently launched an impressive set of interactive profiles for neighbourhoods across the County.  The statistics help paint a picture of the local area covering topics such as: (1) Population Age and ethnicity; (2) Health; (3) Crime; (4) Quality of life; (5) Environment; (6) Employment; (7) Education; and (8) the local economy.  The profiles will help NYCC and its partners when planning services to make sure they are taking local variation and local needs into consideration.

2. RESOURCES & NEWS

2.1 New Local Observatory demonstration site

The Support and Marketing teams have developed a new Local Information System / Local Observatory demonstration site based on off-the-shelf web design tools.  This embeds InstantAtlas Server (IAS) and demonstrates some of the new functionality in the 6.2 release for dynamic embedding of IAS content into other web pages.  Specifically the demo shows:

(1)    Embedding InstantAtlas Server 6.2  into a broader Local Observatory style site.

(2)    Embedding individual charts and tables (called ‘profile widgets’)  into other web pages and add relevant commentary.

(3)    Adding context-sensitive web links that can take users directly to dynamic Data Views and Profiles.

(4)    Using clickable maps as a simple and easy-to-use method for users to select area-based profile reports.

The pages are built as templates using a web design tool.  This demonstrates how a  Content Management System (CMS) tool can be implemented to allow non-technical staff to maintain content.

2.2 New demos published to illustrate the capabilities of version 6 templates

The InstantAtlas Template section of the InstantAtlas website has new demos by geographical area.  You can now view separate demos for both the UK and USA – Click Click here to see USA template examples | Click here to see UK template examples

2.3 UK Local Economic Monitor (LEM) – latest updates

Published – 11 November 2009

2.4 West Midlands Regional Observatory – New recession impact monitoring reports

WMRO has produced a new set of InstantAtlas interactive maps to monitor the impact of the recession at different geographical levels in the West Midlands:

• By West Midlands Local Authority
• By West Midlands Census ward
• Neighbourhoods in the Rural Regeneration Zone

The maps show Jobseeker’s Allowance (JSA) claimant rates (the proportion of the working age population claiming JSA), which gives an indication of unemployment.  The maps help to see how the recession is affecting different areas.

Vist the WMRO recent blog posting ‘Observations’ for more.

2.5 InstantAtlas demos by theme

The Marketing team have put together some interesting examples of InstantAtlas Reports by theme for you – there are more available on the InstantAtlas showcase.

(1) InstantAtlas for Community Information Systems (CIS)  – New York City Community Health, US (Demo) using the Single Map
Purpose: An atlas comprising a wide range of community health indicators based on the New York Community Health Survey with a 4-year time series. The atlas is based on our new InstantAtlas version 6 template.
How to use the Single Map Template (Video Link)

(2) InstantAtlas for Survey Reporting – Behavioral Risk Factor Data Explorer, MMSA Rankings, US (Demo) using the Single Map
Purpose: This Single Map template provides a single map view of current BRFSS state for specific US Census Bureau Metropolitan and Micropolitan Statistical Areas (MMSAs). The use of color-coded symbols make it easier to distinguish data values geographically.  How to use the Single Map Template (Video Link)

(3) InstantAtlas for Cancer Mapping and Reporting – West Virginia Incidence Rates and Trends / Major Cancer sites (Demo)
Purpose: This Single Map view presents West Virginia’s aggregated 1997-2001 and 2002-2006 incidence rates across the state and graphs trends between both time periods.

2.6 Choose how you ENGAGE with InstantAtlas

InstantAtlas customers are always looking for ways to keep in touch with news and features of the product and how it is being used around the world. So as well as providing the eBulletin service here is a compilation all the ways you can keep up with the latest news:

InstantAtlas RSS News Feed - for all our latest Blog posts - click here to grab all the news | If you’re not sure how to use RSS – click here for an overview and list of feed tools

NEW – the InstantAtlas Email News Feed – If you prefer the latest Blog posts to come in via your email InBox then you can subscribe to ‘email updates’ on the Blog.

Twitter - Join the growing InstantAtlas community – click here

Delicious – Bookmark – click here

Digg – InstantAtlas RSS Feed – click here

Flickr – View InstantAtlas reports on Flickr by Theme of interest – click here

VIDEO CHANNELS

YouTube – Watch Free InstantAtlas Video Tutorials for InstantAtlas Desktop and Server – click here and subscribe today
YouTube – Español
YouTube – Deutsch

Metacafe – click here for channel – click here for video RSS feed

Vimeo - Click here for channel – click here for video RSS feed

Daily Motion – click here for video RSS feed – subscribe to channel

Important Note | If you are unable to view Video channels from your place of work all videos are available on CD in MP4 format.  Currently CD’s are only available for UK organisations with a UK business address

2.7 UK InstantAtlas LIS Workshops in Feb 2010

For all our customers and anyone interested in developing Local Information Systems (LIS) please make a note of the best date for one of our events in February.  We are hoping to finalise the programme of both the ‘North’ and ‘South’ event soon and will publish them on the web site.  More information is available from the LIS Section of our web site.

2.8 UK LIS Data & Report Packs – New Economic Assessment Duty Pack

Our partners, OCSI, have been working on the development of data resources and outputs to create an Economic Assessment Duty Pack.  A number of local authority customers have expressed an interest in taking this to address their obligations for production of their Economic Assessment.  For more information see our Packs page on the LIS Section of our web site.

3. PRODUCT NEWS

3.1 New Area Profile Template version 6.3 (coming soon)

There are a couple of significant enhancements to the new Area Profile template (version 6.3) planned for release at the end of December 2009.  It  includes new configuration files for a new Radar Chart profile and an Election Results Report.

• The Radar Chart is a significant improvement on previous releases with the ability to display a significant number of select areas on the same chart with a legend for each area.  This ability makes it useful for comparing profiles of multiple areas.
• With local and national elections coming up in the summer of 2010 in the UK, a new election results report configuration is designed to make it easier for customers to use our templates for the purposes of reporting their results at any geographic scale.

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Download a PDF Version of this bulletin post

Welcome to the latest InstantAtlas News.  In this month’s edition we cover the following:-

CLIENT EXAMPLES

• Client Spotlight 1: Jacksonville Community Council Inc. (US) – Community Snapshot Project
• Client Spotlight 2: Remote Codex (Brazil) – InstantAtlas reports for The Rio Grande Institute of Rice
• Client Spotlight 3: Nottingham City Council (UK) - Tracking Neighbourhood Change in Nottingham
• Client Spotlight 4: Oxford Consultants for Social Inclusion (UK) – Local Economic Monitor

NEW RESOURCES

1. New Solutions page: Reporting and Mapping Election Results – InstantAtlas for the creation of live results and socio-political reports and atlases that offer rich visual analysis
2. New Solutions page: Reporting Survey Results - Addressing the challenge of presenting survey statistics intuitively to large audiences
3. New demo: Geodemographics – Demonstration of the freely available OAC (Output Area Classification) dataset for school locations across Nottingham, UK
4. New demo: Deprivation - The optimum way to present the UK Index of Multiple Deprivation? A new demo for London Borough of Newham based on the new Area Profile Template
5. Updated UK Local Government Examples page – see what others are doing in the UK at a local level, review best practice, re-use ideas and share configuration and metadata files
6. New UK InstantAtlas Local Information Systems (LIS) Workshops announced for Feb 2010
7. New UK LIS Data & Report Packs page – example reports now available

PRODUCT NEWS

• InstantAtlas Desktop 6.2 – How to use the NEW Bubble Plot Template
• InstantAtlas Server 6.2 coming soon – key new enhancements

NEW SUPPORT TOOLS AND RESOURCES

• Video Overviews – InstantAtlas Server (1) Profiles Module (2)  Data Views Module by Jan Weststeyn of InstantAtlas Support Team
• Video Tutorial (Public Health) – Learn how to use InstantAtlas Desktop for reporting on Infectious Diseases by John Bartholomew | International Development

CLIENT SPOTLIGHT

1. Jacksonville Community Council Inc. (USA)

Community Snapshot presents over 100 indicators in nine themes including Education, Economy, Natural Environment, Social Environment, Arts and Culture, Health, Government, Transportation, and Public Safety. These indicators provide a roadmap for the community in Northeast Florida.

This interactive InstantAtlas report prepared by JCCI presents the most current data together with historical trends, and will help define critical areas demanding community attention.

JCCI on
(click icon to visit site)

2. Codex Remote (Brazil)

New InstantAtlas reports for the Instituto Rio Grandense do Arroz

Click on the image to view this InstantAtlas Sample
(Produced using InstantAtlas Desktop 5)

This new InstantAtlas report was created for the Instituto Rio Grandense do Arroz in by Codex Remote [Porto Alegre-RS, Brasil].  It includes a rich selection of statistics with time-series graph, bar chart and a map with multiple layers of information.  This report provides the client with up to date information on the rice harvests, prices and factors affecting yields.

3. Tracking Neighbourhood Change in Nottingham

A project has recently been undertaken by Nottingham City Council to support a requirement to evaluate and monitor regeneration activities within the City. The main objective of this project was to develop a tool to evidence social, economic and environmental change over time in relation to investment, providing a holistic approach to regeneration and enabling the monitoring of outcomes at a local level.  This is in line with current UK local initiatives around Total Place and Strategic Commissioning.  A management dashboard style interface was built based on the Profiles Module of InstantAtlas Server to present a wide range of relevant information for tracking change at a neighbourhood scale.  More information will be published about this application in next month’s eBulletin.  If you’d like to know more please contact us.  There is additional information about mapping spend patterns on our Local Government Examples page.

4. Local Economic Monitor

For those of you yet to discover it, OCSI have developed a free online resource, the Local Economic Monitor, (http://www.local-economic-monitor.org) allowing you to monitor key economic indicators down to district level across England.  We have been asked recently by a number of people “are OCSI maintaining this as new data is published?”.  The answer is “Yes”, they are keeping it up-to-date as new data becomes available.  Read their latest news on data updates.

Latest News – green shoots emerging?

RESOURCES

1. Mapping and Reporting Election Results

InstantAtlas dynamic reports are ideal for presenting “live on-the-night” election results reports online.  They are also being used for delivering more analytical political and social atlases to analyse and predict voting behaviour. The key feature of the product is its ability to create reports and maps at any geographic scale or coverage.  This allows local, regional, national or international organisations to deliver richly interactive outputs.

For those in the UK, County and European elections are planned for early June and there’s the small matter of a national election around that time too – see http://www.aboutmyvote.co.uk/ for details.

For more on using InstantAtlas for reporting election results click here

111th Congressional Election Results, 2008

The US Congressional Election atlas demo shows the results of the House of Representatives race of the 111th Congressional Elections, which occurred simultaneously with the 2008 Presidential Election (Obama v McCain). The interactive report displays the winning political party and elected Representative for each Congressional District. You can filter results rapidly for specific States, Census Divisions and Census Regions.

InstantAtlas Template: Single Map

Bremen 2009 Election Atlas

The Bremen Election Atlas shows the results of the recent elections to the German Bundestag in the districts of the City of Bremen. The interactive application allows comparisons with the previous elections and also links to selected socio-demographic indicators. – See Report in German – or English

2. Reporting and Mapping Survey Results

InstantAtlas directly addresses the challenge of presenting survey results in a way that allows any number of web site users to explore them intuitively. It is an ideal internal and external reporting solution where users need the flexibility to explore the results interactively themselves and the ability to understand the geographic breakdown of the results.

We have provided some recent Survey Reporting examples below from the US and UK. They use a number of different InstantAtlas Templates.

Click on the screenshot images to load the examples.

For more information on Survey Reporting with InstantAtlas – click here

Place Survey Report to compare the West Midlands region as a whole to other English regions

The West Midlands Regional Observatory, in its role as source of regional facts and figures, created a place survey atlas for West Midlands councils, to co-ordinate place survey data for the region.  The interactive features of the atlas let councils choose data that is useful to them, and identifies local priorities.  Hosting the atlas on their website ensures that the atlas is accessible to a range of regional partners.

InstantAtlas Template: Area Profile

Bournemouth Council, UK  – Local Place Survey report 2008

This report has been created by Bournemouth District Council to allow users to explore the results of the 2008 Place Survey at Ward level.

InstantAtlas Template: Area Profile

3. New report on Geodemographics

A number of customers have expressed interest in exploring the potential of the freely available Output Area Classification (OAC) created by ONS and the University of Leeds.  We developed this OAC demo for Nottingham at Output Area level based on our Single Map template.  It presents the locations of all schools across the city in relation to standard OAC groupings.  It incorporates extensive metadata, notes and photos (available from the University of Sheffield OAC site).  The map shading scheme follows guidelines used by others for presenting OAC Supergroups and Groups.  Filters are also available to subset the area by Ward.

If you are an InstantAtlas customer and would like to re-use any of the metadata and configuration files developed for this OAC demo please contact our Support Team (support@geowise.co.uk) and we can send you the full report – this could save you a significant amount of time.

4. Presenting the Index of Multiple Deprivation

We have developed this IMD report for the London Borough of Newham using the Area Profile Template.  It presents the IMD 2007 as a local and national rank and includes the main sub-domains allowing users to view a ‘deprivation profile’ for any of the 159 Lower Super Output Areas in Newham.  Filters are available for those LSOAs classified as most deprived 5%, 10%, 15% and 20%.  The default map classification and shading of graphic elements are all consistent.  Branding applied to the atlas is in line with the corporate style of www.newham.gov.uk.

If you are an InstantAtlas customer and would like to re-use any of the metadata and configuration files developed for this IMD report please contact our Support Team (support@geowise.co.uk) and we can send you the full report – this could save you a significant amount of time.

5. Local Government Examples page

We have fully revised our existing set of local government examples to demonstrate that InstantAtlas is a multi-purpose tool that can be used for a wide range of purposes.

We hope to inspire customers with new ideas and highlight new business areas where InstantAtlas can add value.  We also want to use this space to present best practice in the application of data visualization principles which others can apply.  If you have suggestions for us to include, please send them to support@geowise.co.uk.

6. New LIS Workshops – February 2010

In response to the results of a recent customer survey, we will be running two one day UK LIS workshops in February 2010, a ‘North’ event and a ‘South’ event.

They will offer a mix of presentation and discussion style sessions.  The programme will include examples of leading LIS applications that review lessons learnt and also future challenges.  Tom Smith, director of OCSI, will chair a discussion around data issues and application to areas like performance frameworks and strategic assessments. GeoWise staff will present ideas on good practice and the future direction of InstantAtlas technology.  We hope the workshops will provide a stimulating environment for existing customers and those interested in LIS applications to share their experiences and help guide the future development of LIS applications.

7. LIS Data and Report Packs

In partnership with OCSI we have developed a set of LIS Data and Report Packs to support public agencies manage and deliver their Local Information Systems and Data Observatories more effectively. The Data and Report packs provide:

• Consistent, nationally published sets of themed indicator data compiled at the lowest geography available, including time series to the most recently available data.
• Data can be provided for customer-defined areas with a range of suitable comparators.
• High quality reports (Profiles and Data Views), that can optionally be loaded into customer systems – view an example summary profile report which is supported as one of the outputs in the Core Starter Pack.
• Including detailed, searchable metadata provided by the data suppliers and enhanced by us.
• A refresh service at appropriate intervals to keep this data up-to-date.

We have now created a dedicated LIS Pack page providing further information and examples of the reports – click here

PRODUCTS

1. New InstantAtlas Bubbleplot Template – Available in IA 6.2

The bubble plot template combines a single map with a bubble plot for multidimensional data reporting. The bubble plot can display data for up to four variables simultaneously using a combination of bubble position, size and colour. The configurations available for this template are adapted for different data presentations styles and levels of expertise. These include using the bubble plot as a normal scatterplot or a funnel plot.

The New Bubble Plot Template can be published with 4 different configurations depending on the data you wish to present.
The options are as follows:-

(1) Scatterplot
(2) Funnelplot
(3) Bubble – Simple
(4) Bubble – Advanced

Find out more about the Bubble Plot Template.

2. What is New in InstantAtlas Server 6.2

Key enhancements that have been added to the forthcoming release of InstantAtlas Server 6.2 include:

• Ability to link (via URLs) directly to specific Profiles and Data Views
• Support for widget fragments and complete profile fragments to allow you to embed these in other web pages (including 3^rd party applications)
• New scatterplot widget for profile reports
• Stacked bar chart functionality in charts for profile reports
• Full support for OCSI Data & Report Packs (including refreshes)
• Overall improvements in performance for handling large datasets and error handling

TOOLS AND RESOURCES

This month’s Bulletin in PDF Format

Get to know InstantAtlas Server better with the recent release of two new videos  covering two IA Server core modules; the Data Views module and the Profiles module.

Data Views Module

Data Views are logical groups of indicators defined by administrators that are delivered as a collection to address the needs and tasks of specific users. They are organised into Themes and can be viewed as InstantAtlas dynamic reports or tables. The Data Views module adds a wizard to the Administration Console for designing and building Data Views and for managing the InstantAtlas dynamic reports that are used to view them. – Watch the Video

Profiles Module

Area Profiles are a widely used and highly effective way of delivering a report containing a mix of appropriate information relating to a specific area or number of areas. The Profiles module adds functionality to the Administration Console for administrators to design and build profiles. – Watch the Video

How to use InstantAtlas for reporting on Infectious Diseases by John Bartholomew

NEW CLIENTS OF INSTANTATLAS

United Kingdom

Government Office East Midlands
Wirral PCT
Royal Free Hampstead NHS Trust
Centre for Economic and Social Inclusion
Chartered Institute of Public Finance and Accountancy
East Sussex County Council
Manchester Joint Health Unit

Ireland

Planet – the Partnerships Network -Irl

Australia

Auckland Regional Council -NZ

Canada

Alberta Health and Wellness, Govt. of Alberta

Germany

Bayerisches Landesamt für Gesundheit und Lebensmittelsicherheit

Die Senatorin für Arbeit, Frauen, Gesundheit, Jugend und Soziales – Bremen

Guatemala

Instituto de Nutrición de Centro América y Panamá

Panama

Ministerio De Salud, Panama City

USA

Alabama Criminal Justice Information Center

Alaska Department of Health and Social Services

Missouri Cancer Registry, Univ. of Missouri-Columbia

Novartis Vaccines and Diagnostics, Inc.

Welcome to the latest InstantAtlas News, in this month’s edition we cover the following topics :-

• Client Spotlight 1: New national Place Survey report for Leicestershire County Council
  
• Client Spotlight 2: Hamburg, Germany – new elections results report
• Client Spotlight 3: National Institute for Health and Welfare THL Finland
  
• Profile your areas with InstantAtlas – background and examples of Area Profiling
  
• InstantAtlas Server 6.0 Video Overview
  
• Cancer Statistics Mapping and Reporting with InstantAtlas
• Forthcoming InstantAtlas Training Courses
  
• New to Wikipedia – InstantAtlas and ‘Local Information Systems’
  
• Where to see InstantAtlas
  

New national Place Survey Results reports for Leicestershire

A new set of national reports (for England) have just been launched to deliver the recently published Place Survey results – they are available from http://www.lsr-online.org/leicestershire-place-survey-2008.html.  The interactive reports were created with InstantAtlas Desktop version 6.1.

LSR Place Survey

The project was commissioned by Leicestershire County Council and published through their Leicestershire Statistics & Research Online service to make these survey results widely available across their internal partnership of organisations.

The reports make best use of the new InstantAtlas Version 6 features including:

(1)    Dynamic filtering based on any selected set.

(2)    New geographic filters have been added including statistical nearest neighbours (to subset the top 10 authorities that are most statistically alike – this is ideal for benchmarking purposes).

(3)    Use of symbols (and compatible  map classification) to allocate authorities into 5 categories (quintiles) allowing users to quickly review ‘problem areas’.

(4)    Ability to present multiple selected areas in the profile chart to aid comparison.

(5)    Ability to show multiple comparator areas in the profile chart – in this case the respective Government Region and the England average.

(6)    Usability improvements allowing users to re-size any window and open/close other windows over the top of existing ones.

(7)    Improved report load time for reports based on larger datasets.

To find out more about the Place Survey and see other reports go to our dedicated InstantAtlas Place Survey page.

New election results report for Hamburg, Germany

Statistikamt Nord is the statistics agency for the states of Hamburg and Schleswig-Holstein and provides central statistical services.  They have been using InstantAtlas for the last two years to publish geographic breakdowns of their statistics online.

They have recently launched a new Election Results atlas for the districts of Hamburg which provide a comprehensive picture of voting behaviours for multiple political parties across the city.  The report presents the results of multiple elections from 2004.

Hamburg Election Results

InstantAtlas is ideal as an Election Results tool and has been used for this purpose by many public organisations.  One of the nice features of this report, new to InstantAtlas v.6, is the ability to control the style of presentation depending on the indicator selected.  So when the user selects the proportion of votes for different parties, the colours of the graphic elements change to reflect the political party colour.  Administrators that develop the reports now have the ability to control how best to present an indicator by default.  This means that tools allowing users to change the presentation style like the Legend button can, where appropriate, be removed thereby simplifying the interface.

The ability to configure the presentation of outputs on an indicator-by-indicator basis is ideal in situations where you want to tightly control how your data is presented to end-users.  This may well be the case, for example, where you are designing public facing reports aimed at citizen users.

Regional health statistics – National Institute for Health and Welfare (THL) Finland

The  National Public Health Institute of Finland recently published new reports using the New InstantAtlas V6 Templates

Timo Koskela (Department of Health and Functional Capacity) recently said, “The important purpose of this report is to give each of the Finnish regions a comprehensive overview of their health status and health determinants and see how they compare to other regions. Most of the data is presented by sex and socio-economic group.  Themes covered include mortality, potential years of life lost and life expectancy.  Health risk behaviours such as prevalence of smoking, obesity, lack of exercise and poor nutritional habits are covered.  One section deals with the incidence of key diseases including cardiovascular and stroke data.
”

View Recent Published Reports | Single Map | Area Profile (without Map)

Area Profiling with InstantAtlas

The production of area profile reports, a process known as ‘area profiling’, is widespread in both public and private sectors to address the need of users to understand the character of a specific area or set of areas. Area Profiles bring together relevant information and data about an area of interest and present it in a structured report comprising a mix of text, maps, charts and tables. The profiled area is often contrasted with geographic or statistical neighbours. In North America the outputs of this process tend to be referred to as ‘State Profiles’, ‘City profiles’, ‘County Profiles’, ‘Community Profiles’ or ‘Neighborhood Profiles’. The processes involved and the type of outputs share many commonalities.

InstantAtlas Area Profile Example -  Community Health Profiles England

Find out more about Area Profiling and see examples of InstantAtlas Area Profile Reports

What is InstantAtlas Server? | A Product Overview

InstantAtlas Server delivers a complete database-driven, web-based reporting solution for statistical and performance related indicators linked to geographic areas or geographically distributed resources (eg. hospitals or companies).  It is being used to support Data Observatories, Local Information Systems, Community Information Systems, and a range of area-based profiling and reporting solutions.

IA Server supports ‘live’ data delivery into InstantAtlas dynamic reports.  It provides a rich set of web-based administration tools allowing content to be managed by a central team or federated to multiple teams across an organisation and its partners.  It’s modular structure means you can tailor a solution to your needs, at a price you can afford and then add additional functionality as your needs evolve.

Find out more about InstantAtlas Server

• Watch the video overview presentation below [For more InstantAtlas Videos - Click Here]
• Download the IA Server Overview
• New Features of InstantAtlas Server 6 – Click here

Cancer Statistics Mapping and Reporting with InstantAtlas

InstantAtlas is now well-adopted by cancer registries in the United States, the United Kingdom and Germany. It is ideal for presenting incidence and mortality data and trends in a spatial context to internal and external audiences.
With the inclusion of interactive charts, graphs, table and map together in a single view, InstantAtlas displays are particularly suited to presenting cancer statistics. The dangers of misinterpretation of clusters common to a lot of cancer mapping can be minimized because both graphs and confidence error bars qualify the visual impressions given in the map view.

Cancer data in the public domain is a sensitive theme. A strong feature of InstantAtlas Designer is the ease with which the author of the reports can adapt the layout, content and annotations easily to suit the intended audience.

We have included some recent examples below, some of which are live operational applications, others are demonstration samples to show the power and flexibility of InstantAtlas. Click on the images below to view the reports.

Example One | Combining USA Cancer Incidence Data with BRFSS Risk Behavior Data

Report Purpose: Provides a double map view of data. Using an Excel spreadsheet, simply combining data from an existing behavioral risk behavior report with CDC/NCI incidence data can make powerful statements. In this first view (click on image) state smoking prevalence and incidence of renal cancer are compared.

Report Purpose: The Institute for Cancer Epidemiology in Lübeck is the first German Cancer Registry to implement InstantAtas. This reports incidence and mortality rates for major cancer sites over a five-year period for Schleswig-Holstein.

InstantAtlas Classroom Training Courses

Why not take advantage of our special offer this Autumn and come along to one of our classroom training courses. This offer applies to two of our courses
based on classroom attendance at our Edinburgh office. – For International customers who wish to attend a virtual training class please contact international sales for details.

Choose from the following options

InstantAtlas Desktop Foundation Course

This course is for users with no previous (or limited) experience of InstantAtlas Desktop Edition, or somebody who having used the product wishes to refresh their knowledge.

InstantAtlas Desktop Advanced Course

This course is for users who are already competent in the use of InstantAtlas and wish to address advanced features of the product. If you have taken the InstantAtlas Introductory Training Course you will have the knowledge required to attend this course.

Dates for the next Two Day Course

September – Monday 28^th & Tuesday 29^th

Location – GeoWise Edinburgh Office

Can’t make these dates? – See our online Calendar for alternative dates and book today

InstantAtlas on Wikipedia

Instantatlas now has its own dedicated Wikipedia page at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instantatlas . You’ll see a new dedicated section for Example sites.  Please add your own favourite examples to this page.

For those customers involved in projects with Local Information Systems (LIS) and Data Observatories, we have initiated a new page on Wikipedia dedicated to this area – see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Local_information_systems. Please refine the content of this page.

Where to see InstantAtlas this Autumn

North America – ESRI Health GIS Conference, Sept. 21-23, Nashville TN – Booth 103

Link to Site – http://www.esri.com/events/health/index.html

North America – Community Indicators Consortium 2009 International Conference, Oct. 1st-2nd, Meydenbauer Center, 11100 NE 6th Street , Bellevue, WA

“Community Indicators as Tools for Social Change”

Link to Site – http://www.communityindicators.net/conference2009.html

Statistikamt Nord is the statistics agency for the states of Hamburg and Schleswig-Holstein and provides central statistical services.  They have been using InstantAtlas for the last two years to publish geographic breakdowns of their statistics online.

They have recently launched a new Election Results atlas for the districts of Hamburg which provide a comprehensive picture of voting behaviours for multiple political parties across the city.  The report presents the results of multiple elections from 2004.

Hamburg Election Results

InstantAtlas is ideal as an Election Results tool and has been used for this purpose by many public organisations.  One of the nice features of this report, new to InstantAtlas v.6, is the ability to control the style of presentation depending on the indicator selected.  So when the user selects the proportion of votes for different parties, the colours of the graphic elements change to reflect the political party colour.  Administrators that develop the reports now have the ability to control how best to present an indicator by default.  This means that tools allowing users to change the presentation style like the Legend button can, where appropriate, be removed thereby simplifying the interface.

The ability to configure the presentation of outputs on an indicator-by-indicator basis is ideal in situations where you want to tightly control how your data is presented to end-users.  This may well be the case, for example, where you are designing public facing reports aimed at citizen users.

In November, we unveiled more useful, transparent and customizable election results reporting on our Web site. Back then we said that surely this was not your grandmother’s results reporting.

And now we’ll wager it’s not even your mother’s.

We’ve made many improvements since, especially to what we’re now calling RaceTracker (formerly Track a Contest). Instead of having to comb through pages and pages of results, it’s the easiest and fastest way to find instant and detailed the results of the races that matter to you.

New features include:

· Contest votes broken down by voters who voted by mail, voted early, or voted the polls on Election Day.

· Google maps that display the precincts that voted on a particular contest.

· The option to view contest results in pie-chart format.

· A cleaner, easier-to-navigate box that creates and stores your contest history so you can easily and continually check results on the races you’re interested in.

· The ability to display contest results by precinct.

It’s pretty cool, if we do say so ourselves.

All the nifty features we had last time around are still there for making Election Night results more useful and transparent, including our Precinct Tracker, which shows the real time location of voting equipment as it moves through the Election Night process, and the Tally Room Cam, which gives viewers a window into the secure room at elections headquarters were votes are tallied. Our post from November’s election will give you all the details. They’re both designed to make the process after the polls close more open and accessible to you, even from your computer.

Also still there are the evening’s reporting schedule, the results archive of previous elections and thresholds for passing ballot measures. 

The first results will be reported at 8:05 p.m. tonight. The next batch follows at 8:30 p.m. and every half hour thereafter until we’re done. Again, check our reporting schedule for details. As we’ve done in the past, we’ll release results in PDF format for easy download and printing (which requires Adobe Reader) and in a Web-based report directly on our Web site.

Results are just hours away; visit the results portal of our Web site here. Until then, steady streams of voters are hitting the polls. More on them later (and join them if you haven’t yet!).