It will greatly help the confernece organizers if authors would submit material as far as possible according to the following guidelines. 1.The extended abstract, including references and figures should not exceed 1500 words or equivalent. 2. For references please follow the style used in the example below. 3. Equations should be centered on the page and numbered consecutively in the right-hand margin. 4. Figures should be presented as an integral part of the abstract, rather than collected together at the end. They should be referred to as Figure 1. Please be sure that figures are legible at the size you wish them to appear on the page. 5. Tables should be in the Word Simple1 style or as close as possible, and should be referenced as Table 1. 6. Digital copy should be provided in Microsoft Word (Versions 6 or later) format either on an IBM-format 3.5'' diskette; CD; by Email to one of the conference organizers given below; or by re-submission through the on-line abstract submission system. On-line submission is the preferred delivery mechanism. yxie@emich.edu danbrown@umich.edu Online Submission is being updated now, we will put an announcement on our website when it is re-opened. (The following example is illustrative only. The section titles are determined by the abstract author and its precise appearance will vary according to your web browser). CENSUS GEOGRAPHY 2001: DESIGNED BY AND FOR GIS? David Martin Department of Geography, University of Southampton Southampton, SO17 1BJ, UK Tel: +44 (0)1703 593808 Fax: +44 (0)1703 593295 Email: D.J.Martin@soton.ac.uk 1. Introducation The 1991 Census of population was the first in the UK to be conducted in what might be called the 'GIS era'. Despite the fact that GIS use in socioeconomic applications has been widespread since the mid-1980s (Martin, 1996), the design of a single census geography based on enumeration districts (EDs) for England and Wales was undertaken manually, resulting in the production of a large number of paper maps (Clark and Thomas, 1990). Digital boundaries were subsequently created commercially by digitizing maps provided by the Office for Population Censuses and Surveys (OPCS), and the ED91 and Ed-Line products produced in this way have seen extensive commercial, governmental and academic use both for simple thematic mapping and more complex GIS applications (Barr, 1993; Charlton et al., 1995). The government committee on the handling of geographic information in 1987 strongly endorsed the use of postcodes as the basis for census geography design (DoE, 1987). However, the 1991 geography was based entirely on census-specific EDs, which have no clear relationship with postcodes except in a very few local authorities, despite the widespread use of postal geography in other applications (Raper et al., 1992). The manually-designed geography of 1991 continued to incorporate wide variation in ED populations, including the presence of sub-threshold EDs, whose small populations caused them to be merged with neighbouring areas in order to preserve confidentiality. To commentators such as Openshaw (1995), the continued use of enumeration geography for data output, the lack of integrated digital geography and the general 'neglect of GIS' in 1991 are seen as unacceptable. 2. Current Developments In April 1996 OPCS and the Central Statistical Office were merged to form the Office for National Statistics (ONS), which has taken on the role of the census office for England and Wales. This paper will describe developments at ONS, and experiments in the use of GIS in census geography design, exploring the potential for a 2001 census geography designed by and for GIS. The paper is divided into four sections. These cover the method by which cnesus geography was planned before the advent of GIS; the introduction for the 1997 Census Test of a GIS for collection geography planning, and the potential for the development of an entirely new GIS-designed output geography for 2001, quite separate from the geography of data collection. The paper will conclude with some summary remarks and recommendations for future census geography design. 3. Results and Findings Omitted 4. Reference Barr, R., 1993, Mapping and spatial analysis, In A. Dale and C. Marsh         (Eds), The 1991 Census User's Guide (London: HMSO), pp. 248-         268. Clark, A. M. and Thomas, F. G., 1990, The geography of the 1991         Census. Population Trends, 60, 9-15. Martin, D., 1996, Geographic Information Systems: Socioeconomic         Applications (London: Routledge). Openshaw, S., 1995, The future of the census, in S. Openshaw (Ed.),         Census Users' Handbook (Cambridge: GeoInformation         International), pp. 1-18. Raper, J. F., Rhind, D.W. and Shepherd, J. W., 1992, Postcodes: the         New Geography (Harlow: Longman).

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