UI design for open data

Hollie Lubbock

UI design for open data

@hollielubbock www.hollielubbock.co.uk

hello

@hollielubbock

— User experience / designer— Many cultural institutions— Museums, galleries some commercial

Back ground for some projects

— data as inspiration— designing the data— helping users see the possibilities of data

What is open data?

— free to use— ideally easy to reuse & remix — available in an accessible format— part of the larger semantic web— Tim Berners Lee 5 star system

http://opendefinition.org/od/http://theodi.org/guides/what-open-data

Use in the semantic web

The Semantic Web isn’t just about putting data on the web. It is about making links, so that a person or machine can explore the web of data. With linked data, when you have some of it, you can find other, related, data.

http://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/LinkedData.html

How can it be used?

£200m possible saving to nhs by switching to a generic drug

http://theodi.org/blog/a-new-era-of-data-innovation

£200m possible savings

— nhs is the National Health Service— On one single type of medication— Found by analyzing open data— in 8 weeks— many more savings possible

Mastodon C (ODI start up)

http://theodi.org/blog/a-new-era-of-data-innovation

How can it be used?

Invisible Airs, YoHa (ODI data as culture)

http://vimeo.com/32030340

How can it be used?

Invisible Airs, YoHa (ODI data as culture)

Why visualization is important

Data skills will become more important as data plays a larger part in our lives

— raw data isn’t easy to interpret— maps, graphs etc. easier to digest

Visualization in history

Florence Nightingale: Causes of Mortality infographic from 1858

So how is this working in the cultural sector?

— common thesauri being developed (cidoc crm)— sharing collections data — Tate (art gallery) — Victoria & Albert museum (uk design museum)— developing Api’s

http://www.cidoc-crm.orghttp://www.vam.ac.uk/api/qb/https://github.com/tategallery/collection

The Future

— maybe a requirement for government funding— GDShavestartedthisoffinUK

https://gds.blog.gov.uk/

What happens when museums get together and share?

Researchspace

— prototype— tool for academics to collaborate — cross collections searching— common thesauri / taxonomy — RDF triple store at the heart

http://www.researchspace.org/

How would we ideally like to search?

— search based on sentence structure

Visualization challenges

— definingthesearchterm(freebase)

Visualization challenges

— helping the user learn the interface

Visualization challenges

— representing a complex SPARQL query

Visualization challenges

— multiplewaystofilter

Demo...

http://vimeo.com/94547832

Data as a pulse of relevance / trends

Royal Shakespeare Company

— showing how Shakespeare is relevant — datafromebay,flickrandtwitter— Twitter API change (not working now)

http://myshakespeare.rsc.org.uk/banquo/

Live data

— data stored for refernece

Helping users

— clear instructions to users

Graphing relevance

— highlights surges in interest

Filtering

— by type of play

Using open data as an enhancement

Victoria & Albert Museum

— world’s largest museum of decorative arts and design, — collection of over 4.5 million objects— founded in 1852 and named after Queen Victoria and Prince Albert.

http://www.vam.ac.uk/http://www.othermedia.com/data/files/othermedia-vawebsite-qa-5.pdf

Navigation

—reflectedorganisationalstructure— not helpful for users— is there a better way?

Using open data as an enhancement

— based on search— templatingonthefly— uses semantic web to draw in relevant topics from external sites— exposed thesauri

http://www.vam.ac.uk/http://www.othermedia.com/data/files/othermedia-vawebsite-qa-5.pdf

The internal fight over the homepage

On the fly templating

— system cached for popular topics

Topic or Theme hubs

Enhancing the topic

@hollielubbock