This page documents ongoing work by the ONS Advanced Content Co-Creation team to develop new tools to visualise and explore local/subnational data across the United Kingdom as part of the ESS service.
Following the approach that we took in developing products for Census 2021, we are providing this page as a transparent, open source window into our "work in progress" on the ESS service. We believe that sharing our work and inviting feedback in this way leads to more relevant, accessible and useful end products.
The ESS service is part of the GSS subnational data strategy, which provides a framework to guide the UK Government Statistical Service (GSS) in producing and disseminating subnational statistics in a more timely, granular and harmonised way.
Specifically, ESS aims to provide one place for users to find, visualise, compare and download subnational statistics by standardised geographies and customer-defined areas.
- Area hub (also preview version with new updates) - Find areas in England and Wales, with links to relevant local content and data.
- Subnational indicators explorer (see source code and data) - Compare local authority areas using a selection of indicators.
- Localised labour market bulletin (semi-automated journalism) - A localised bulletin describing a number of indicators for a selected local authority.
These prototypes are in various stages of development, and in many cases are experimental. They may not end up becoming live products.
- UX journey prototype - An user journey for exploring data at a national and local level. Only "find a local area" section currently has content.
- Build a subnational profile - A fork of Build a custom area profile using LSOA geographies and non-census datasets (GVA, live births, mid-year population).
- Data viz demos - Test visualisations using maps, line charts, scatter charts and tables.
Some other tools and apps that we've built in the process of the ESS project.
- Robo editor - A tool for building localised articles using a PUG template and CSV data source.
- UK administrative geographies, 2014-2023 - A tool for getting UK country, region and local authority boundaries for different years.
- ESS data viewer - An experimental tool for displaying ESS datasets from the IDS Data Explorer using SPARQL queries.
These initial proof-of-concept prototypes are not currently in active development.
- Subnational statistics maps - A port of Census maps with ESS datasets.
- Localised labour market bulletin a semi-automated demo component providing text and charts for labour market indicators to local authority level.
- IDS Data Explorer - Find, filter and download a selection of datasets related to ESS and other projects.