September 21, 2011 -- The biggest shake-up in UK Parliamentary constituencies in modern times has just taken a major leap forward with the publication of the Initial Proposals from the Boundary Commissions for England and Northern Ireland. Those for Scotland and Wales will be following soon.

In his opening keynote address to the AGI GeoCommunity ’11 conference Jamie Justham, the founder and chairman of Dotted Eyes, described the background to the Initial Proposals and discussed the changing landscape of MP constituencies to an audience keen to understand the role of GIS in analysing the potential impact of such changes. 

The Initial Proposals contain images of maps along with the names of wards making up each constituency. The public consultation on these proposals requires in-depth analysis to keep the electorate for all mainland constituencies within 5% of the national average. Political parties and administrators will therefore want to use a GIS.

To meet this need Dotted Eyes has created a set of proposed constituency boundaries for England and Northern Ireland. Shape and Tab formats are supplied, making the data ready for use in almost any GIS application, as well as KML for use in an OGC KML reader, such as Google Earth. These are now available for downloading free of charge from www.dottedeyes.com/boundarymap.

Ben Allan, MD of Dotted Eyes, explains, “We have made this data set available free of charge to illustrate the power of GIS for visualising and analysing data. This new data set will help political parties, lobbyists, councils and the media model the political repercussions of these changes and help to ensure that the public consultation process is well informed.”

The constituency boundaries are derived from the ward boundaries in the OS OpenData Boundary-Line and Land and Property Services (LPS) Medium Scale Vector data sets. LPS has waived its normal royalties in this particular case. The terms of use are based on the Open Government Licence.

The constituency changes arise from the Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Act 2011 which is set to reduce the number of MPs to 600 from the current 650 and even out the number of registered voters to within 5% of the national average (except in a few island areas).

About Dotted Eyes

Dotted Eyes has a long heritage as innovators of data and information solutions for private and public sector organisations. For more than 20 years the company has pioneered location-based intelligence products and services which enable better-informed business decision making at every level of business operations.

Serving some 900 customers UK-wide, through expert consultancy, training and product development in healthcare, local government, not-for-profit and the commercial sector, Dotted Eyes’ mantra is to ‘simplify, automate and integrate’  data and information.  This approach uniquely equips senior and departmental levels of organisations to access, visualise, analyse and share complex data in simple, useable formats to make more cost-effective, locally-relevant decisions.

Dotted Eyes maintains long standing expert partnerships with location data providers such as Ordnance Survey and Pitney Bowes Business Insight and operates certified training courses nationwide.  It serves some 130 UK Primary Care Trusts, every ambulance service in England and Wales and household name not-for-profit organisations like the National Trust, among others.

For more information, visit: www.dottedeyes.com