Narrative Visualization of Open Data

Abstract

Several governments around the globe have recently released significant amounts of open data to the public. The main motivation is that citizens or companies use these datasets and develop new data products and applications by either enriching their existing data stores or by smartly combining datasets from various open data portals. In this chapter, we first describe the development of open data over the last few years and briefly introduce the open data portals of the USA, the EU, and Switzerland. Next we will explain various methods for information visualization. Finally, we describe how we combined methods from open data and information visualization. In particular, we show how we developed visualization applications on top of the Swiss open data portal that enable web-based, interactive information visualization as well as a novel paradigm-narrative visualization.