A Cloud-based Exploration of Open Data: Promoting Transparency and Accountability of the Federal Government of Australia

The Open Data movement has become more popular since governments such as USA, UK, Australia and New Zealand decided to open up much of their public information. Data is open if anyone is free to use, reuse and redistribute it. The main benefits that a government can obtain from Open Data include transparency, participation and collaboration. The aim of this research is to promote transparency and accountability of the Federal Government of Australia by using Cloud-related technologies to transform a set of publicly available data into human-friendly visualizations in order to facilitate its analysis. The datasets include details of politicians, parties, political opinions and government contracts among others. This paper describes the stages involved in transforming an extensive and diverse collection of data to support effective visualization that helps to highlight patterns in the datasets that would otherwise be difficult or impossible to identify.

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