Abstract
Open government data initiatives provide citizens with access to the information that governments have about their countries (such as data about people, resources, infrastructure, or services) upon which they act. Information visualizations can help to make sense of these complex data and knowledge collections, but are mostly used to shed light on subselections of data only, without coordinated efforts to connect them to bigger pictures up to now. In analogy to linked data initiatives, this article discusses methods and strategies to link information visualizations in the government data realm and thereby to connect widely available local pictures and insights into more coherent global mental models. We expect related developments to provide benefits for communication professions like civic education and political journalism, and to open up enhanced methods for cross-domain exploration and reasoning for (linked) open government data. Thus linked information visualizations aim for supporting students, readers, and citizens to meet a widening range of macro-cognitive challenges, which complex societies are facing in increasing amounts.
Highlights
Democracies rely on the frequent participation of their populations in complex cybernetic circles of collective decision-making
Political journalism, and open government data, linking visualizations raises the interoperability of existing diagrams – and extends visual communication into more complex data and topic realms
While information visualization (InfoVis) libraries offer a variety of well-established methods to visually analyze well-delimited data sets, we see a specific need to develop and promote novel linking techniques to meet the demands of more complex topic constellations, which frequently connect different data dimensions and domains
Summary
Democracies rely on the frequent participation of their populations in complex cybernetic circles of collective decision-making. The opening of governmental knowledge collections (Open Government Data, OGD) aims to grant insights into the black box of political systems and governmental activities (Ubaldi, 2013), which could ensure citizens’ well-informed participation later on (Fig.). As (interactive) graphics in data journalism, or as visual interfaces to OGD collections they convey visual insights into the structures and dynamics of political systems (Windhager & Smuc, 2014) and support the construction of mental models of these systems While these visual representations provide efficient overviews on a multitude of particular aspects of political systems, there has been little progress to interconnect these diagrams into bigger pictures on a visual basis.
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