An Open Source Geodemographic Classification of Small Areas in the Republic of Ireland

Geodemographic classifications have progressed from manual classifications of areas through to complex, highly marketable products used in both the public and private sectors. As their production became commercialized, input variables moved beyond census variables to include other, often not publicly available datasets, and hence the resultant black-box approach increased in sophistication, but was less open to scrutiny. In the UK this was somewhat reversed with the production of the Output Area Classification (OAC) from the 2001 census. As an alternative approach, in this paper we demonstrate the production of a geodemographic classification for the Republic of Ireland, using a different approach to OAC, and extending the ethos of transparency and reproducibility.