UI design for open data

Good design can increase the value of open data to the public and industry professionals.

But what is open data and how can it be used? The focus of this talk is using design to aid the release of knowledge from within cultural institutions.

But it isn’t just about museums: I’ll be discussing the challenges of designing for complex UIs in general and how we can use narrative to inform and guide the user through abstract interactions.

Designer @bureau_va
RSC projects and Researchspace © Bureau for Visual Affairs
V&A © Othermedia

Transcript

1. Hollie Lubbock UI design for open data @hollielubbock www.hollielubbock.co.uk
2. hello @hollielubbock — User experience / designer — Many cultural institutions — Museums, galleries some commercial
3. Back ground for some projects — data as inspiration — designing the data — helping users see the possibilities of data
4. 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
5. 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
6. 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
7. £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
8. How can it be used? Invisible Airs, YoHa (ODI data as culture) http://vimeo.com/32030340
9. How can it be used? Invisible Airs, YoHa (ODI data as culture)
10. 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
11. Visualization in history Florence Nightingale: Causes of Mortality infographic from 1858
12. 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.org http://www.vam.ac.uk/api/qb/ https://github.com/tategallery/collection
13. The Future — maybe a requirement for government funding — GDS have started this off in UK https://gds.blog.gov.uk/
14. What happens when museums get together and share?
15. Researchspace — prototype — tool for academics to collaborate — cross collections searching — common thesauri / taxonomy — RDF triple store at the heart http://www.researchspace.org/ © Bureau for Visual Affairs
16. How would we ideally like to search? — search based on sentence structure
17. Visualization challenges — defining the search term (freebase)
18. Visualization challenges — helping the user learn the interface
19. Visualization challenges — representing a complex SPARQL query
20. Visualization challenges — multiple ways to filter
21. Demo... http://vimeo.com/94547832
22. Data as a pulse of relevance / trends
23. Royal Shakespeare Company — showing how Shakespeare is relevant — data from ebay, flickr and twitter — Twitter API change (not working now) http://myshakespeare.rsc.org.uk/banquo/ © Bureau for Visual Affairs
24. Live data — data stored for refernece
25. Helping users — clear instructions to users
26. Graphing relevance — highlights surges in interest
27. Filtering — by type of play
28. Using open data as an enhancement
29. 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
30. Navigation — reflected organisational structure — not helpful for users — is there a better way?
31. Using open data as an enhancement — based on search — templating on the fly — 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
32. The internal fight over the homepage
33. On the fly templating — system cached for popular topics
34. Topic or Theme hubs
35. Enhancing the topic
36. @hollielubbock