Research Labs

OriginsInfo specialises in geodemographics and the production of geodemographic software tools. Our key product is Origins, a segmentation tool that helps organisations to understand the cultural, ethnic and linguistic origins of their users, customers, clients and employees.

Schools Performance Data
Classifying pupils by where they live: how well does this predict variations in their GCSE results?. This paper summarises key findings resulting from the appending of the neighbourhood classification system Mosaic to the records of the Pupil Level Annual School Census (PLASC) within the National Pupil Database (NPD) of the Department for Education and Skills (DfES).

Personal and Family Name Origins - Hot Topic
Using a variety of data sources we have created a database of over 600,000 family names and 200,000 personal names. Enter a person's name and you will be able to identify its cultural origins.

Street and House Names Profiler
The most recent study we have conducted is into street and house names. This research investigates changes in fashion over time in both the first and the second element in street names, such as of ‘Coronation’ and ‘Street’ and of ‘Albert’ and ‘Square’. It also analyses house names.

Research Papers
Geodemogaphics is a hot area of research and the creator of origins, Richard Webber, has been a driving force in this area. This section has links to existing publications from different authors in the area of geodemographics.