Open Data & Visualisation

 

In one of the more unusual invitations that I’ve received over the past few years, I was asked to speak about visualisation and open data at Transport Ticketing 2012, currently happening down in South Ken. Interestingly, in spite of my various posts on visualisation and work with a variety of companies on the spatial aspects of their ‘big data’, I’d not really thought a great deal about the open aspect.

So I’ve taken the opportunity to try to pull together my thoughts not only on the relationship between the two, but also on why companies should be actively exploring whether and how to make available to others aspects of their operational data. I’ve grouped the talk into four areas: why should companies open up their data in the first place? to whom should they open it up once the business case exists? what data should be made accessible? how should they go about opening it up? and, finally, by way of a wrap-up, what are the potential costs and benefits that could be realised?

Although this talk is focussed on transportation visualisations, I think that many of the same ideas apply to other domains as well and hope that you find the PDF thought-provoking no matter what your line of work.