Recent years have witnessed considerable enthusiasm over the opportunities offered by open data. Across sectors, it is widely believed today that we are entering a new era of information openness and transparency and that this has the potential to spur economic innovation, social transformation, and fresh forms of political and government accountability. Despite the evident potential of open data, and despite the growing amounts of information being released by governments and corporations, the results are not yet satisfying. There are several reasons behind this inefficiency: 1) Data are available, but at the same time are diverse & incompatible; 2) the lack of standardization, along with the plethora of vocabularies in use, 3) citizens/users do not seem to be attracted by the existing tools. These reasons can become real obstacles for stakeholders that are primarily involved with OGD, both on the “supply side”, such as governmental bodies, but also on the “demand side”, immediate consumers of OGD such as policy-makers or journalists. In this context, YourDataStories (YDS) has developed a highly customizable online platform for data exploitation focused on the financial flows that are critical for transparency, collaboration, and participation. YDS has demonstrated applications that support users to interconnect, search analyse, explore and understand available data in order to extract insights, facts, and material to support and shape their data stories. In particular, YDS offers: i) the backbone in terms of a semantic data model & a powerful architecture for bringing together heterogeneous data from siloed data sources; and ii) an easy & user-friendly solution allowing the drill-down, visual exploration and combination of data into meaningful stories. The YDS infrastructure & the provided reusable components have been used to create a set of visualisation apps, ranging from Web applications (offering facet search, workspaces & dashboards, “wizard-like" interfaces allowing various kind of stakeholders to find, understand and consume the data), to mobile & social media applications that inform citizens and gather their feedback.
The YDS has been piloted and validated in three different usage scenarios: 1) Follow Public Money, 2) Tracking Development Aid and International Trade; 3) Cross-Europe Financial Comparability. The YDS system has been tested in different countries by more than 100 users. The final prototype of YDS is seen by real-world users as a success and a platform that satisfies an actual demand. Finally, organizational and economic impacts have been assessed, and an exploitation plan has been provided, which sets the grounds for future exploitation of project’s results.
