This case study promotes opening up government data through analytics and visualizations to make the information more engaging and reusable. It suggests crawling Latvian government websites to publish analytical reports and dashboards using open data from sources like election donations, university applications, and traffic accidents. The main challenges are a lack of awareness about open data in the country, data published in undocumented XMLs or PDFs instead of open formats, and no regulations around open data.

1. Case Study
Promote Open Data
with Analytics and
Visualizations
Raimonds Simanovskis
.com
github.com/rsim
@rsim

2. Typical
<insert any country>
government data
web sites...

8. Boring...
Non interactive...
Hard to reuse...

9. But when presented as
nice visualizations...

13. Much more “sexy” and
fun to explore :)

14. Download source data or
crawl Latvian government web
sites and publish analytical
reports and dashboards
using .com

15. Examples
Parliament election
Donations to parties
Applications to universities
Road traffic accidents

16. Main issues
•no awareness about Open Data,
no regulations, nobody cares
•XMLs without documentation,
sometimes paginated HTMLs,
sometimes PDFs

17. Free to use for public data