Finding the Essence in Geographic Statistics - Promoting Informed Decision Making

Official statistics have great potential to generate knowledge and serve as basis for decisions taken by many actors in society; however, the potential is grossly under-utilised because many people do not know about statistics, do not care about them and do not understand them. This paper highlights an innovative tool for exploring geographic statistics, which has been developed by the University of Linköping, Sweden. The paper demonstrates how the tool has been implemented in Denmark as a powerful enabler to different categories of users of statistics, who wish to understand the geographic dimension of societal phenomena and find the facts hidden in the data. The scope of the tool spans from leading edge regional researchers, through local and regional planners and news media, to the general public, e.g. citizens who want to understand what goes on in their community. Consequently, the tool allows for many different ways of presenting itself and the data, and it is applied to many different levels of geographical detail. It will be demonstrated how Statistics eXplorer can be used by an advanced user to explore geographic statistics, uncover hidden structures and relationships in the statistics; how an analyst can present her findings and stories to a broad audience; and how users “from the outside” can insert their own data in the tool, investigate new theories and communicate them to colleagues.