Co-creating visual overviews for open government data

In the last years governments have published multiple datasets on the Web. These datasets describe information about multiple areas, such as health, education and infrastructure. One risk of these Open Data initiatives is the creation of vacuous data portals ---similar as vacuous truths in logic--- where the publication of multiple datasets distract the publisher from publishing good, interesting and valuable datasets. One way to identify this risk consists in helping stakeholders to evaluate the quality and value of the datasets available. This is not an easy task, for many of such stakeholders may not have the technical skills to explore and analyze a dataset rapidly. In order to facilitate the rapid analysis and exploration of these datasets, we present our visual overviews, a visual approach for exploring datasets. These visual overviews were co-designed together with a series of stakeholders, taking into consideration their feedback and recommendations. We present a prototype and we describe the methodology used to create this tool.