Show me the Data! A Systematic Mapping on Open Government Data Visualization

During the last years many government organizations have adopted Open Government Data policies to make their data publicly available. Although governments are having success on publishing their data, the availability of the datasets is not enough to people to make use of it due to lack of technical expertise such as programming skills and knowledge on data management. In this scenario, Visualization Techniques can be applied to Open Government Data in order to help to solve this problem. In this sense, we analyzed previously published papers related to Open Government Data Visualization in order to provide an overview about how visualization techniques are being applied to Open Government Data and which are the most common challenges when dealing with it. A systematic mapping study was conducted to survey the papers that were published in this area. The study found 775 papers and, after applying all inclusion and exclusion criteria, 32 papers were selected. Among other results, we found that datasets related to transportation are the main ones being used and Map is the most used visualization technique. Finally, we report that data quality is the main challenge being reported by studies that applied visualization techniques to Open Government Data.