Data & Stuff // Neil Houston

Data has been released (leaked) to Wikileaks, which contains information regarding engagements that have occured during the Afghan war. I’ve produced a visualisation, showing which of these engagements involved a friendly/civilian/enemy being killed in action [KIA]

These make up a smaller proportion of the data than one first might expect, but are still significant [other incidents may involve arrests, IED detection, engagements that didn't result in a KIA].

This is a map of Afghanistan, showing the regions the incidents occured (by colour), the size of the mark denotes the scale of the KIA count, whilst the shape of the mark shows who the attack was on.

Take a look at it ‘full screen’ for more ease of use, hovering over individual points will give you some details, as well as the fact you can filter by how many people were killed in the incident, and filter down to what type of incident.

Some other more detailed analysis was conducted by the Guardian (amongst others), who had pre-release access to the data. Further information on the data can be found on Wikileaks – Afgham War Diary. This visualisation was created using Tableau Desktop, and published to Tableau Public.

Last week I commented on the proposal that councils would have to publish their payments made to suppliers that were over £500. You can see my full thoughts, here – Local Data – Payment Publishing Response.

This week, it appears that Adrian Short, has taken the data released from Royal Borough of Windsor & Maidenhead, and produced Armchair Auditor.

This is a website that simply takes the CSV information provided by the council, pulls it into a database, and allows you to examine it by Directorate (Services), and Supplier (Company paid for delivering a service). It is quite nice and easy to use, and you can simply see that, for instance, Capita Business Services Ltd were paid 15 times, totalling £52,493 between Sept 2009 and March 2010, the average amount of each payment was £3,499.

It also highlights the fact that the Supplier Master may give you a bit more information than you currently have. As Capita are shown as:

• Capita Business Services Ltd
• Capita Education Resourcing
• Capita Education Services Ltd
• Capita Software Services
• Capita Training Ltd

So it looks like these are related businesses, indeed seperate companies, but the ultimate beneficial owner maybe ‘Capita Group PLC’. It also shows that payments were made to Capita Education Resourcing and Capita Education Services. These may actually be one company, and just different divisions within the company structure. If you had a full supplier master, it’s likely that these different suppliers will have an indicator to show that they are ‘related’.

A quick check at Companies House doesn’t actually show a result for Capita Education, nor some of the others. For instance Capita Education Resourcing is a trading name of Capita Resourcing Ltd, likewise this may be the same for Education Services.  Companies may be trading under many different names, all of which are actually present as different suppliers in the system, therefore the actual company may be receiving more funds from the council than you presume at first thought.

All of the above was found through a quick play with Armchair Auditor, it shows the strength of the tool at being able to get to the data quickly, and concisely as well as being able to direct someone to your findings with relative ease.

Whilst at the same time, we can see the challenge at understanding the data, especially when you start to look across councils and try and answer questions like ‘How much is supplier X getting paid for services bought by councils across the country’. I’ll discuss approaches for how you might deal with that situation another day.

For now, I’m going to look at the work Adrian has done, and see what else might be interesting within it.

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