Data Rich - Information Poor

The allocation of ear-marked public funds amongst administrative areas is driven by indicators of local conditions, derived from large detailed volumes of government-collected data. This talk will discuss the problems involved in the computation of social indicators, focusing on primitive measures, such as the widely used but potentially misleading ratio indicators.

Despite some 40 years of research on social indicators in data-rich nations, boasting the latest advances in technology, the state-of-the-art of information abstraction remains poor. Yet, public funding is becoming increasingly reliant on a medley of performance indicators. Members of the public could collaborate over the Internet in the evaluation, even if not the design, of indicators.

This is an opportune time since the imminent 2001 population census is likely to instigate the computation of fresh social indicators for use over this decade.