Signal #3 Data Visualization
This week, as I was searching for interesting new ideas of using big data, I became very interested in the topic of “data visualization”.
Today, a lot of city governments have come to see the value in public engagement, whether it is in the form of providing an online platform for citizens to voice their concerns or inviting business to provide better solution to government’s public service, such as trash collecting and bus route design. And especially, more and more city governments are willing to join the national initiative of opening up government data for free access and free use, with the hope that by sharing the information with the public, it could eventually save money and reduce cost.
However, the reality is that these government data websites usually have very low online traffic or visit counts. Many of them, after the grand political buzz at the beginning, becomes face projects buried under a shining “innovation” tittle. When we, as ordinary citizens or small business owners, try to navigate through these database, we become very frustrated. If we leave aside for a moment questions on these data’s accuracy and timeliness, the data we see usually are presented in huge excel tables, or word documents, or other statistics software format files such as cvs. for download only. However, we very often don't have relevant technical skills or even software to apply to and therefore have to give up at this point.
Last week, I stumbled upon a website that is doing this a bit differently. This is a website called DataViva.
According to the introduction on its website, DataViva is a visualization tool that provides official data on exports, economic activities, locations and occupations throughout Brazil, in eight applications, each of which allows different ways of visualizing the data available. The project is initially created by the Minas Gerais Government in Brazil to help the formulation of economic development politics and better decision making. The two data-sets are provided by the Brazilian Ministries of Labor and Employment and of Development, Industry and Foreign Trade, presenting data about the export of 1,256 products and 865 occupations in 427 economic activities.
Soon the platform showed its potential as a Big Data tool, so the government uploaded data for the whole country to the platform. They hope that it can help create a solid basis for dialogue between the public and the private sector that is supported by empirical data.
What I found worth-noting is that it is website designed with the aim of making the data easy to understand and easy to use. It works in simply three steps. First, the user selects one database, then the year and then the variables he or she would like to see and clicks “Build”. More importantly, it provide 8 different visualization format for people to use according to their own personal preference.
