Having a quick peek at a dataset released today by the HSCIC on Accident and Emergency Attendances in England – 2014-15, I noticed that the frontispiece worksheet allowed you to compare the performance of two trusts with each other as well as against a national average. What particularly caught my eye was that the data for each was presented in textual form:
In particular, a cell formula (rather than a Visual Basic macro, for example) is used to construct a templated sentence based using the selected item as a key on a lookup across tables in the other sheets:
=IF(AND($H$63="*",$H$66="*"),"• Attendances by gender have been suppressed for this provider.",IF($H$63="*","• Males attendance data has been suppressed. Females accounted for "&TEXT(Output!$H$67,"0.0%")&" (or "&TEXT($H$66,"#,##0")&") of all attendances.",IF($H$66="*","• Males accounted for "&TEXT(Output!$H$64,"0.0%")& " (or "&TEXT($H$63,"#,##0")&") of all attendances. Female attendance data has been suppressed.","• Males accounted for "&TEXT(Output!$H$64,"0.0%")& " (or "&TEXT($H$63,"#,##0")&") of all attendances, while "&TEXT(Output!$H$67,"0.0%")&" (or "&TEXT($H$66,"#,##0")&") were female.")))
For each worksheet, it’s easy enough to imagine a textual generator that maps a particular row (that is, the data for a particular NHS trust, for example) to a sentence or two (as per Writing Each Row of a Spreadsheet as a Press Release?).
Having written a simple sentence generator for one row, more complex generators can also be created that compare the values across two rows directly, giving constructions of the form The w in x for y was z, compared to r in p for q, for example.
So I wonder, has HSCIC been doing this for some time, and I just haven’t noticed? How about ONS? And are they also running data powered conversational Slack bots too?
OUseful.Info, the blog... 