Visualization tools for open government data

Abstract

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.

The story of the sixth myth of open data and open government

“…The challenges of open public data re-use are usually concentrated on problems such as citizen's lack of technical competence (Graves and Hendler (2013), or problems understanding the data (e.g., Artigas & Chun, 2013;Graves & Hendler). Graves and Hendler (2013) claim for instance that there is an important portion of the population who could benefit from the use of public data but are unable do so because they cannot perform the essential operations needed to collect, process, merge and make sense of the data.…”

“…Graves and Hendler (2013) claim for instance that there is an important portion of the population who could benefit from the use of public data but are unable do so because they cannot perform the essential operations needed to collect, process, merge and make sense of the data. Besides, data are frequently of poor quality (Kuk & Davis, 2011), and offered in heterogeneous formats missing clear semantics that clarify what the data describe (Hoxha & Brahaj, 2011).…”

“…Besides, data are frequently of poor quality (Kuk & Davis, 2011), and offered in heterogeneous formats missing clear semantics that clarify what the data describe (Hoxha & Brahaj, 2011). According to a number of researchers, a key challenge is for users to make sense of the data (Artigas & Chun, 2013;Graves & Hendler, 2013;De Cesare et al, 2013;Cornford et al, 2013;Hoxha & Brahaj, 2011). Use of open data requires knowledge found in different communities, that is, across core stakeholder groups in the public data community (Ojo & Janssen, 2013).…”

“…The data needs to be interpreted and interpretation is always a function of a collective (Cornford et al, 2013;Ojo & Janssen, 2013). To make it easier to understand the data, one proposed solution is visualization (Artigas & Chun, 2013;Graves & Hendler, 2013).…”

Outstanding Challenges in Recent Open Government Data Initiatives

“…For Instance, OGD involves a wide range of stakeholders such as citizens, employees, journalists, researchers, scientists, and engineers. Yet, governments around the world have made more than one million datasets available [8]. These datasets involve various fields such as health, education, transportation networks, budgets, performance and financial reports [9].…”