In an official podcast broadcast recently, Richard Sterling, the cabinet official behind the UK government's open data initiative, has expressed concerns that users are not drawing 'sensible conclusions' from public sector data sets. However, visualisation, he states, could provide the answer.
Sterling admitted in the podcast that users are striving to make sense of the vast volume of public sector data sets published online. He expressed concerns that after browsing the 2,500 data sets available on data.gov.uk, the public may be coming to conclusions that 'weren't quite valid'. According to him, the government has attempted to add context to data by including short contextual summaries. However, it may be necessary to provide visualisations of popular data sets, such as bar graphs, pie charts and scatter graphs, he has noted.
The website, which was launched in Autumn 2009, contains data feeds on such themes as crime, education, health and spending. Third parties have already used feeds published on the website to create 'mash-up' applications - primarily for mobile devices.
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