UK Data AtlasAPI

Get a measure

Everything about one measure: what it counts, its unit, whether it can be summed or averaged, and which periods and areas it's published for.

get
/measures/{measure-id}

Good to know

  • Where another nation publishes its own version, elsewhere links to it and says whether the two can be compared.

Path parameters

  • measure-idstringrequired

    A measure id from GET /v1/measures, such as population, or one of its aliases, such as house-prices. An alias is read as the id it names, and the response's Content-Location header gives the request it was read as. Case, spaces and punctuation are set aside, so House Prices is house-prices.

Returns

Envelope

The measure definition.

  • apiVersionv1required
  • atlasReleasestringrequired

    The immutable /atlas-release releaseId for the artifacts that produced this response.

  • metaobjectrequired
    Show1 child field
    • nextCursorstring | nullrequired

      Opaque cursor for the next page, or null at the end.

When it goes wrong

  • 404No resource matches that identity.
  • 503The referenced build artifact has not been built yet.

Every error has the same shape. See Errors for how to handle them.

Technical notes

Show the precise behaviour

A measure's definition: what it counts, the unit, whether it may be summed or averaged, and which source partitions publish it with what national coverage.

unit remains the published display label. unitDefinition supplies an API-owned canonical code, scale and (where applicable) denominator for safe unit-aware calculations; it never changes the source artifact or an observation value.

Where another nation publishes its own answer to the same question, the measure carries concept and elsewhere. Each entry in elsewhere names that measure, the countries it covers, and whether the two are comparable. For the four national deprivation indices they are not: each ranks its own nation's areas from 1 against its own domains and weights, so they cannot be put on one scale. The reason travels with the link rather than living in documentation, because the numbers themselves give no sign of it.