Professor David MartinProfessor David Martin has led the way in modelling populations in geographical information systems.
His career with the UK Data Service and its predecessors has been a long and rich one. In the first of two blog posts, we catch up with him to talk about his key achievements and contributions to the field.
Much of your career has been driven by the census – what turkey rcs data is it that fascinates you about census data?
For me, the fascinating thing about the census has always been that it’s the only source of information that provides a really geographically-detailed picture of the UK population – the single most comprehensive source of data we have, in fact.
That matters, because it provides the denominators for everything else that we’re interested in.
We may be exploring detailed ethnicity, people’s journeys to work or migration patterns – and the data on all these topics (and many more) are there. It’s the comprehensive nature of the dataset that means we can do all these things with it in a completely unique way, which I find incredibly exciting.