Analytical Data Visualization for Open Data : Using Sundsvall Municipality Public Data

Abstract: To guarantee the well-functioning of modern societies, it is essential to ensure thatcitizens are aware of their environment as well as the government's actions andperformance. Therefor citizens need to have access to data collected by publicbodies from the activities within their society. However, these data may not easilyand instantly be perceivable by people. To release the potential of these data,which lead to improving the lives of citizen, the data need to analyzed, enhancedand eventually visualized, so the outcome would be usable to all regardless theirage and education. In this project, we propose, design, implement, and evaluate aninteractive analytical visualization framework for open-data. To achieve our purpose,the recent open data-sets from Sundsvall Municipality has been used as bothour case-study and demonstration sample. The solution has been design and builtbased on a set of requirements and principles we suggested for an ideal solution.The offered solution in this project enables users to analyze data by interactingwith the visualization graphics. The solution let the user extract information andfacts from large data-sets, and correlate different property of data by applying filtersand categorizing data, and see the result instantly. Standard web technologieswere used to implement the solution, namely HTML5, JavaScript, and SVGgraphics, which made the system to be cross-platform and high-performing. Tohandle the big-data, we enhance the data-set before-hand by performing aggregateoperations using Map-Reduce and parallel computing algorithms (i.e. Java-8 parallelstreams), and the further computation is implemented in JavaScript, and processedat the client-side.