Rebuilding the Great Britain Historical GIS, Part 1: Building an Indefinitely Scalable Statistical Database

Abstract

The Great Britain Historical Geographical Information System (GIS) has been rebuilt around a single central table holding all statistics in one column, currently containing 14,541,491 data values. This architecture enables extremely flexible data handling, but requires that the context of each data value be captured entirely as metadata. Statistical reporting areas are defined via an ontology of administrative units, in which hierarchical relationships are compulsory while boundary polygons are optional. What a number measures is recorded via a relational implementation of the Data Documentation Initiative standard, locating each value within an n-dimensional matrix, or nCube, whose dimensions are variables such as age, gender, and occupation. The data library can be extended to additional countries or more statistical topics without adding any database tables.