New tool to explore and visualise Europe's inequalities

CG Co-Director Professor Melinda Mills MBE recently launched the Mapineq Link tool for exploring and analysing regional distribution of socioeconomic inequalities.

Mapineq Link comprises three components: a database that includes various indicators from multiple sources, an interactive web dashboard that makes the database accessible to a broad audience, and an Application Programming Interface (API) that allows users to access and retrieve data from the database. Through the dashboard, journalists, policymakers, researchers, data scientists, and other users can access information to explore data spatially and uncover correlations between indicators.

Researchers from the University of Groningen, in collaboration with the University of Oxford, have collaborated with other European universities to develop the new tool as part of the EU-funded Mapineq project, which studies educational, socioeconomic, and health inequalities across the life course.

The tool uses multiple governmental, commercial, and unconventional data sources, including geo-located socioeconomic, environmental, infrastructure, and health indicators from government agencies, commercial providers, and less conventional channels such as satellite images.

The graphical, easy-to-use mapping tool, available for all users, allows local, regional, and national comparisons of associations between any two user-chosen indicators included in the database. The tool will also enable researchers to conduct more complex analyses using any number of indicators, and in combination with their own data.

Professor Mills, Director of the Leverhulme Centre for Demographic Science (LCDS) at the University of Oxford, said: "Mapineq Link is a fundamentally different interactive tool that harmonises geospatial data, from pollution to real-time information on housing prices, to tackle local disparities and promote equality throughout the life course. This groundbreaking tool is a crucial step towards a new equality of place.

"Policymakers may want to understand how different types of inequalities or inequalities are patterned in a certain region, district, or country, whereas journalists may want to use it for investigative journalism or producing data-driven stories.
"Furthermore, researchers can download and embed data in their articles, and data scientists can access and retrieve data for further analysis."

The dashboard was launched for public use in December 2024, and is free to use and does not require registration. To introduce the tool and gather user feedback, the Mapineq project organised a webinar series where Professor Mills and Dr Douglas Leasure, LCDS Senior Researcher and Data Scientist, presented the structure and scope of Mapineq Link, demonstrated the dashboard, and provided a technical walkthrough of the API. You can watch the recordings of all three sessions in the Mapineq Link YouTube playlist.



Professor Mills concludes: "Future plans for Mapineq Link include expanding the database beyond Europe, enhancing its functionality based on user feedback, and incorporating new indicators such as job site advertisements to see supply and demand in different regions."

Further reading

Mapineq Link reports (Mapineq)

Mapineq Link database (Mapineq)

New tool to explore and visualise inequalities across Europe (LCDS News)

Posted 03/02/2025 15:30