In recent years many government organizations have imple- mented Open Government Data (OGD) policies to make their data publicly available. This data usually covers a broad set of domains, from financial to ecological informa- tion. 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 prob- lems 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. Vi- sualizations 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.

1. Visualization tools for
Open Government Data
Alvaro Graves and James Hendler
@alvarograves - @jahendler
gravea3@rpi.edu - hendler@cs.rpi.edu
Tetherless World Constellation
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
1
Saturday, June 22, 13

2. Agenda
• Challenges for Open Government Data
• Identifying stakeholders
• Soluition developed
• Conclusions
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Saturday, June 22, 13

3. Challenges for Open
Government Data
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Saturday, June 22, 13

4. Open Data is everywhere!
• Over 1.000.000 datasets from national and local
governments
• Lots of information about education, health, budgets,
transportation, etc.
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Saturday, June 22, 13

5. Available ≠ Usable
• Although data can be accessed by many
people, few can use them
• For many tasks, data manipulation requires
knowledge in programming, statistics, etc.
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Saturday, June 22, 13

6. Challenge
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• What is needed for non-technical users to consume
and explore Open Government Data?
• How can we empower domain experts that lack
experience with Data?
Idea:
Use of visualizations can
make easier for people to consume data
Saturday, June 22, 13

7. WhyVisualizations?
• Visual inspection of data
is helpful
• It is easy to share and
consume for non data
experts
• Can help to detect
trends and outliers
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Anscombe’s quartet
“Attractions in Berlin”
Saturday, June 22, 13

8. Identifying
stakeholders
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Saturday, June 22, 13

9. Usage survey
• Asked information about what type of data
and how they use it
• Survey via social media
• Do you use visualizations?
• How important are certain features of
visualizations?
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Saturday, June 22, 13

10. Results
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Saturday, June 22, 13

11. Results
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Saturday, June 22, 13

12. 12
Results
Saturday, June 22, 13

13. Results
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Saturday, June 22, 13

14. Interviews
• We know there is a need, but who are the
stakeholders of Open Government Data?
• 12 interviews with journalists, sociologists,
engineers, etc.
• Based on these interviews, we created a
series of Personas which represent
different groups of people
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Saturday, June 22, 13

15. Five profiles
• Government data provider
• Government data consumer
• Researcher/Journalist
• Civil programmer
• Citizen
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Focus on the first three.
Saturday, June 22, 13

16. Problem grouping
•Exploration
• Provenance and metadata questions
•Creation
• How to create a visualization?
•Repurposing
• How to reuse someone else’s visualization
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We grouped the problems described during the interviews
based on several criteria
Saturday, June 22, 13

17. Solution developed
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Saturday, June 22, 13

18. Back to the first question....
• How can we empower citizens that are experts in certain
areas but lack experience with data?
• Tools that:
• Facilitate creation of visualizations
• Provide better exploratory mechanisms
• Ease sharing and viralization
• Allow repurposing of visualizations
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Saturday, June 22, 13

19. Facilitate creation of
visualizations
• I want a tool where I can create a visualization
in, say, no more than 6 steps
• Need some rapid prototyping techniques
so user can obtain immediate feedback
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Saturday, June 22, 13

20. Better exploratory
mechanisms
• Visualization by itself is not enough!
• Provide ways to understand how the
visualizations was processed
• Provide mechanism to obtain the URL of
the data used, when it was downloaded,
etc.
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Saturday, June 22, 13

21. Ease sharing and
viralization
• Facilitate communication between Data
Providers and Data Consumers
• Visualizations should be easy to share via
the media people use more often
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Saturday, June 22, 13

22. Allow repurpose of
visualizations
• Do not force users to start from scratch!
• Critical for Government Data Consumers
• Useful for exploring different approaches to
visualizations
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Saturday, June 22, 13

23. Prototype
• Facilitates the creation
of visualizations based
on OGD
• Records and exposes
provenance
automatically
• Permits sharing and
repurposing of
visualizations
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Saturday, June 22, 13

24. Conclusions
• We need better tools for OGD
• Visualizations are key in understanding
OGD without special training
• By identifying the needs and limitations of
stakeholders, we can build such tools
24gravea3@rpi.edu @alvarograves
Saturday, June 22, 13