part of the 1841 occupational table

Data Documentation

The Vision of Britain system holds a large library of historical statistics. We store all the data values in one big list, and for each value we record:

We record WHAT each number measures via our implementation of the Aggregate/Tabular Data Extension developed by the Data Documentation Initiative. This places each data value within an nCube whose dimensions are defined by variables (sometimes organised into variable groups), like occupation and gender and age, each of which is a set of categories, such as "Males" and "Females":


The implementation is structured as an ontology containing 6,598 entities of the following types, linked by 21,124 relationships:

Entity typeEntities in system
Databases 1
Themes 10
Rates 63
nCube Groups 12
nCubes 186
Variable Groups 16
Variables 171
Categories 6,065
Measurement Units 14
Universes 60