Turning Open Government Data Portals into Interactive Databases

Abstract

The launch of open governmental data portals (OGDPs), such as data.gov, data.gov.in, and open.canada.ca, have popularized the open data movement of the last decade, which now includes numerous other portals from other public or private institutions. These portals publish large numbers of datasets related to a very wide range of topics. Although the amount of datasets in OGDPs are increasing, the functionalities provided by most of the OGDPs to the end users are limited to finding the datasets based on the title and description, and downloading the actual files. This limitation hinders the end users, especially those without technical skills, to find the open data files and make use of them.

This thesis presents Governor, a web application developed to make open data tables more accessible to the end users in several ways. First, Governor facilitates searching the actual records in the original tables in OGDP. Second, Governor allows users to preview the tables in the web browser directly without downloading them. Third, Governor allows users to integrate multiple tables to form enriched datasets. A key feature here is automatically finding and suggesting joinable and unionable tables to users based on the latest state of their integrated tables. These operations are performed in the web browser interactively through a few clicks without using a programming language or a spreadsheet software. Lastly, Governor provides a set of features to summarize the provenance of integrated tables allowing users and their collaborators to easily trace back the values in integrated tables to the original tables in the OGDP.