Geodemographic Software: OAC Coding and Description

Last week saw the launch of a plethora of new tools related to the open geodemographic classification OAC.

I am just about to step down as chair of the Output Area Classification User Group which represents OAC and last week convened my final annual conference. One of my long standing irritations about the Output Area Classification has been the lack of simple tools that firstly enable you to append the classification to your own postcode level data, and secondly; the availability of descriptive material about things end users are actually interested in. However, in the past few months I have pushed hard to rectify these issues through our user group.

OACoder – Postcodes to OAC Conversion

Through one of my side projects with researchers at UCL (Public Profiler) we have released a simple coding tool called OACoder that uses the newly released ONS Open NSPD dataset. This can be downloaded here and takes a CSV list of postcodes and simply appends the OAC codes.

OAC Grand Index

A grand index is a basic descriptive tool which disaggregates index scores by geodemographic clusters for multiple responses to survey variables, administrative and transactional data. This is a resource which the user group will add to over time. This can be downloaded here.

OAC Colours

Ongoing debate over the years has surrounded the standardisation of colours used in the generation of OAC maps and graphs. These are by no means ‘official’ colours, however are those commonly used by members of the OACUG committee. The colour codes can be found here.