Affiliations: [a] INRIA Chile, Santiago, Chile | [b] Tetherless World Constellation, Department of
Cognitive Science, Albany, NY, USA | Faculty of Business Administration, Information
Systems Department, Université Laval, PQ, Canada | Fundacion Universidad de las Americas Puebla, Business
School, Santa Catarina Martir, San Andres Cholula, Puebla, Mexico | Graduate School of Management, Clark University,
Worcester, MA, USA
Abstract: 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.
Keywords: Visualizations, open government data, eGovernment, open data
