Visualization of open data: A case study of climate data

Abstract

The development of technology has promoted large amount of data to transmit through the Internet rapidly. As a result, data has accumulated and become big data. Data visualization plays an important role in revealing the hidden information in such a tremendous amount of data. On the other hand, governments around the world are making efforts in "open data". Although a lot of data generated by government become accessible, the majority are still text files and tables such as txt, xls, csv, xml files. If the citizens want to have comprehensive understanding of those data, data visualization will be necessary. Presenting all the data in graphs and figures can maximize the value of open data and are favorable for further use. In recent years, governments around the world trend to use the Comprehensive Knowledge Archive Network (CKAN), which was developed by Open Knowledge Foundation (OKF), as the tool to build their open data platforms. Hence, this research attains the open data released by governments by using the API provided by CKAN, takes the rainfall data of the United Kingdom area, which was on the open data platform (DATA.GOV.UK) released by the Met Office of the United Kingdom government, as an example, and visualizes these data by collocating with programming in Python. Through the experiment, the feasibility of this open data visualization process has been proved. If different themes of research and depths of the data are adopted this process, the value of open data might be amplified.