OPUS is a three-year project, funded under the European Commission 5th framework IST research programme. It was approved in April 2003 and completed at the end of April 2006. The Opus Final Conference was held on Thursday 20th July 2006 as part of the ESRC Research Methods Festival. You can see the programme and review the presentations by clicking here.

The project has finished, but this web site will remain in operation as a focus for discussion of the methodology developed under OPUS. Documents, including all deliverables from the project, will be moved here from the internal project site over the next few months.

Project Summary

Developments in IST create an increased need for comprehensive information on socioeconomic systems. Notable examples include innovations in urban and regional transport planning and in the health services sector. To meet these needs, data from diverse sources (e.g., conventional sample surveys, census records, operational data streams and data generated by IST systems themselves) must be combined.

There currently do not exist appropriate methods to enable the combination of complex spatial, temporal and real time data in a statistically coherent fashion. The aim of the project is to develop, apply and evaluate such methods.

We will develop a general statistical framework for combining diverse data sources, specialise this framework to estimate indicators of mobility and undertake a pilot application in London. The feasibility of extending the framework to other domains (e.g., health, environment, social statistics) will also be investigated.

Project Objectives

The overall aim of the OPUS project is to contribute to improved decision making in the public and private sector within Europe by developing innovative statistical and database systems to enable the combination of data from disparate, cross-sectoral sources.

In order to achieve this overall aim, the key scientific objective of the project is to develop a generic statistical framework for the optimal combination of complex spatial and temporal data from survey and non-survey sources. The framework will be sufficiently abstract to be applicable in a wide range of potential socio-economic domains. It will be demonstrated in transport pilot applications in London and Zurich and in smaller-scale feasibility studies in a number of other cities and regions and in a feasibility study in the health sector.

The transport pilot applications will involve the definition of specific structural relationships amongst measured quantities and the characterisation of sampling/non-sampling errors, based on domain knowledge from the field of transport planning. The necessary database and estimation software to enable the application of the statistical framework to mobility will be developed. There currently does not exist a statistically coherent methodology to address general problems of data combination in the transport, health and environment sectors.

The success of the work will be measured by the extent to which the models and methods developed can be demonstrated to lead to improved estimates of key policy relevant parameters, either in terms of enabling the combination and use of data sources that were hitherto incommensurate and/or in terms of leading to demonstrable improvements in the accuracy and/or precision of estimated parameters. These factors will constitute the relevant “efficiency indicators” for the project and will enable the benchmark comparison of results across space and time.

Click here for more details of the Work Programme.

Further information may be obtained from the project leader:

Prof John Polak

Head of Centre for Transport Studies

Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering

Imperial College London

London SW7 2AZ