1. YourDataStories: Transparency and Corruption Fighting through Data Interlinking and Visual Exploration
Georgios Petasis1, Anna Triantafillou2, Eric Karstens3
1 National Centre for Scientific Research (NCSR) “Demokritos”, Athens, Greece
2 Athens Technology Center (ATC), Athens, Greece
3 European Journalism Centre (EJC), Maastricht, The Netherlands

2. Overview Motivation The YourDataStories approach Implementation
Evaluation
Conclusions and future directions

3. Open Data

4. Open Data…

5. Open Data…

6. Open Data: Current Status

7. Open Data: Current Status
We have data!
Many datasets available
Many areas covered
Open data has the potential to:
spur economic innovation;
spur social transformation; and
to spur fresh forms of political and government accountability
But…
heterogeneous & immature

8. Motivation Economic open data: Current status With great potential!
Diverse and Incompatible
Lack of standardization
Plethora of vocabularies in use
Lack of visibility of existing data
Citizens/users do not seem to be attracted by the existing solutions and tools
With great potential!
We need tools and infrastructure to alleviate these problems
Data is diverse and incompatible
difficult and tedious procedures to processing and consumption
combining, aligning, merging different datasets for a more complete picture,
processing different time-spans of the same dataset
concentrating on specific aspects of the data, through filtering.
The lack of standardization
plethora of vocabularies in use
less effective usage and consumption
production of low quality results and conclusions
being less capable for machine consumption
visibility of existing data is quite limited
tools and public services providing access to open data are not massively popular#
they do not seem to answer anything beyond the simple questions that can be answered by an indexed search engine.
Citizens and users do not seem to be attracted by the existing solutions and tools
Hardly any interaction/integration between open data and social media, due to lack of social characteristics

9. YourDataStories Solution
A platform for data exploration focused on the financial flows
that are critical for transparency, collaboration, participation

10. Our Approach (1) The starting point is a triple store
We assume that economic data have been already crawled, cleaned, converted to RDF following a common ontology and stored in a triple-store
A SPARQL endpoint is analysed
Through a set of predefined queries
Aiming to retrieve the underlying data model
Classes, properties, types, cardinality
Analysis at the RDFS level

11. Our Approach (2) The result of the analysis is a set of graphs
“Top” nodes
Representing classes
Nodes representing
Properties
Data types
Nodes have:
Scale
Role
Cardinality

12. Our Approach (3) The “top” concepts are heuristically identified
Using information like graph centrality
The information contained in graphs is used to automatically support operations
Data selection
Data visualisation
Analytics

13. Data Selection (1) Graphs are used to extract an indexing schema
Currently Apache Solr is supported
Instances of top concepts are converted into JSON-LD objects and indexed
JSON-LD objects can contain instances from non-top concepts
The YDS “advanced search” application is configured
For querying indexed resources

14. Data Selection (2)

15. Data Visualisation (1)
Graphs are used to extract visualisation information
What properties can be used as x/y axes, in which plot types
The YDS “Workbench” application is configured
For generating custom plots of various types

16. Data Visualisation (2)

17. Input Data Model Analysis
Architecture
Search
SPARQL Cache (MySQL)
JSON-LD API
JSON Cache (MySQL)
Model Specification
Web Applications
Analytics
Developers …
Input Data Model Analysis
Search Configuration
SPARQL
Views

18. Components and Applications

19. Components and Applications

20. Components and Applications

21. Components and Applications

22. Evaluation (1)
The proposed approach has been used to create a set of applications
On some preselected datasets
Several development cycles were evaluated
More than 60 users
Primarily journalists, public sector employees, representatives of NGOs and business
Two scenarios:
Complete half-open scenarios
Explore the solution on their own

23. Evaluation (2)
Evaluation Results

24. Conclusions and Future Work
Evaluation results suggest that:
Non-experts can access and analyse data with minimum time and effort
Integrating data from different sources, along with the powerful navigation and visualisations, enables insights that cannot be gleaned from original sources
Test our approach on more datasets
On domains other than economic data
Assess the development of analytics for a new domain

25. http://www.yourdatastories.eu http://platform.yourdatastories.eu
Thank you!