Making sense of Open Data Statistics with Information from Wikipedia
This addresses the need for laymen to make sense of raw open data statistics, but it is incremental as it integrates existing data sources without a major methodological breakthrough.
The paper tackles the problem of interpreting open data statistics by combining them with historical events from Wikipedia in an interactive interface, and the user study showed that users could intuitively find relations and liked the approach.
Today, more and more open data statistics are published by governments, statistical offices and organizations like the United Nations, The World Bank or Eurostat. This data is freely available and can be consumed by end users in interactive visualizations. However, additional information is needed to enable laymen to interpret these statistics in order to make sense of the raw data. In this paper, we present an approach to combine open data statistics with historical events. In a user interface we have integrated interactive visualizations of open data statistics with a timeline of thematically appropriate historical events from Wikipedia. This can help users to explore statistical data in several views and to get related events for certain trends in the timeline. Events include links to Wikipedia articles, where details can be found and the search process can be continued. We have conducted a user study to evaluate if users can use the interface intuitively, if relations between trends in statistics and historical events can be found and if users like this approach for their exploration process.