Visual analytics for open government data

The Open Government Data initiative accelerated publishing and sharing of diverse government data with enterprises, software developers and citizens. The key challenge with this unprecedented amount of government data is to make sense of them in a timely manner i.e. find the meaning of the data to assist in decision making. The analytical tools and apps to filter, sort, aggregate for summary along different spatio-temporal dimensions will help find trends and outliers. The capabilities to combine diverse data from different sources may also help users to understand the information and knowledge embedded in data sets. One of most powerful data exploration and analytics is data visualization. In this tutorial, we present two different tools for visual exploration and analytics for citizens and researchers, making use of diverse data sets from different sources, such as government, social media and enterprise or personal collections. Specifically, we focus on Geographic Information Systems (GIS) for mapping data using ArcGIS Explorer, a cloud based data integration and visualization tool and Google Fusion Tables for tabular data. The tutorial is geared toward social science researchers, students and citizens in general.