In recent years many government organizations have implemented Open Government Data (OGD) policies to make their data publicly available. This data usually covers a broad set of domains, from financial to ecological information. While these initiatives often report anecdotal success regarding improved efficiency and governmental savings, the potential applications of OGD remain a largely uncharted territory. In this paper, we claim that there is an important portion of the population who could benefit from the use of OGD, but who cannot do so because they cannot perform the essential operations needed to collect, process, merge, and make sense of the data. The reasons behind these problems are multiple, the most critical one being a fundamental lack of expertise and technical knowledge. We propose the use of visualizations as a way to alleviate this situation. Visualizations provide a simple mechanism to understand and communicate large amounts of data. We also show evidence that there is a need for exploratory mechanisms to navigate the data and metadata in these visualizations. Finally, we provide a discussion on a set of features that tools should have in order to facilitate the creation of visualizations by users. We briefly present the implementation of these features in a new tool prototype focused on simplifying the creation of visualization based on Open Data.

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In the last years, many government organizations have implemented Open Government Data (OGD) initiatives. The data published describe a broad set of areas, including environment, budget and education among others. While these initiatives often report anecdotal success regarding improved efficiency and governmental savings, the potential applications of OGD remain a largely uncharted territory. In this paper, we claim that there is an important group of people interested in OGD -e.g., journalists and activists-who could benefit from the use of OGD, but who cannot do so because they cannot perform the essential operations needed to collect, process, merge, and make sense of the data. The reasons behind these problems are multiple, the most critical one being a fundamental lack of expertise and technical knowledge related to data management and visualizations. We propose the use of visualizations as a way to alleviate this situation. Visualizations provide a simple mechanism to understand and communicate large amounts of data. We also show evidence that there is a need for exploratory mechanisms to navigate the data and metadata in these visualizations. Finally, we provide a discussion on a set of features that tools should have in order to facilitate the creation of visualizations by users. We briefly present the implementation of these features in a new tool prototype focused on simplifying the creation of visualization based on Open Data. In many cases, however, the sole availability of data is not enough for activists and advocates to make use of such data. Among other reasons, the lack of technical expertise related to data manipulation (including knowledge about programming languages, protocols, databases) limits an important part of the population to consume OGD. As a way to diminish these problems, we propose the use of visualizations to consume, explore and share data. Visualizations have proven to be an effective way of interacting with large amounts of data in very different fields, ranging from history [32] to economics [37] to basic science [51]. There are however several problems with existing visualization technologies and tools. First, most of these tools and techniques consider visualizations as "opaque", finished artifacts. By "opaque" we mean that it is not possible to explore where the data came from or how it was used to create a visualization. Was the latest version of the dataset used? Did it include all the data or were the outliers removed? Are reasonable questions that a person may ask after looking at a visualization. By finished, we mean that it is not possible to reuse the interpretation of the data that led to the visualization. Current tools do not allow users to create derivative works from existing visualizations, forcing them to start from scratch. If these limitations can be solved, we claim that the use of visualizations can greatly improve the use of Open Government Data by some stakeholders.One first step necessary to find if visualizations are a valuable data metaphor for peopl...

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