Best practice visualisation, dashboard and key figures report

(with Tom Heath, Michael Heil, Jack Hardinges, and Jamie Fawcett), OpenDataMonitor Report D2.3

Published

2014-07-01

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Summary

Various initiatives have emerged attempting to benchmark different aspects of the open data ecosystem, each placing a different emphasis or adopting different methodologies. The OpenDataMonitor project takes a particular perspective, focusing on automated assessment of open data deployment across Europe, as determined by analysis of the (meta)data available in open data catalogues.

This report presents the suite of metrics that the OpenDataMonitor platform will compute based on harvested metadata. These metrics are classified at the following levels of (decreasing) granularity: 1) measures over the aggregate; 2) per-geography measures; 3) per-catalogue measures; and 4) per- dataset measures.

To aid in gaining insights from these metrics, the report examines a range of visualisation techniques that may be employed to present them in graphical form. These are mapped to each metric to guide implementation of the OpenDataMonitor platform, coupled with a survey of software visualisation libraries that may be used in the project.

Recognising the need to present metrics and visualisations in coherent groups rather than in isolation, the report concludes with a review of information dashboard techniques and best practices, including recommendations of how these may be adopted in generating dashboards for users of the OpenDataMonitor platform.

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