People still know little about data visualization, much less how to access data to turn it into a visual experience.
A post on Datavisualization.ch provides a thorough perspective about the value of Open Linked Data for visual creators.
The post explains the Semantic Web and Linked Data. To show the connection, Peter Gasner adds the concept of Open Data as a third pillar for visual creators.
Open, Linked Data has clear licensing terms and it can be easily linked to other data sets. He created an image to show how open Linked Data is represented. You can see that it is a small amount of the overall data we have available. The light blue data represents what is open. Dark blue is open and linked.
What is available open Linked Data. Wikipedia provides open Linked Data as does data.gov.
Sites like data.gov have started to provide Open Data as a central, searchable catalog, often with the option of accessing the data through APIs, which makes it a lot easier to consume the data, as it doesn’t have to be transformed, combined and prepared for a program to use. With this central catalog in place, it is now possible to go a step further and start transforming this data into a huge Linked Open Data set that is accessible to everyone.
The issue is with the data itself. It can often be of poor quality, making it difficult to use for visual creators.
There are several ways to make sure data is open and linked:
- The data is freely accessible and verifiable.
- It can be accessed by other people and turned into other works.
- The data is connected to other databases.
- Knowledge is built into the database so more people can work with it.
There are more examples but this gives a picture of what is meant by open linked data.
