The Data

In this initial version, only a small experimental set is available, limited to a few Canadian, French, Japanese and British governmental bodies. This data is concerned with demographic, traffic, health, agricultural and other national statistics.

Exploring

Exploring the data starts off with a query. Queries may range from the more directed (e.g. "population of wild birds") to the more exploratory (e.g. heron). With more exploratory queries, the user is interested in simply finding out what data there is on a topic.

The results to a query are presented in three main parts: a description, a visualization (currently time series graphs) and a snippet of the table from which the data was extracted.

The results are presented in this way to provide the user with as much information as possible in order to understand the data source and to determine if the data is of interest.

In the example below, the user has searched for skimmed intending to look for data on skimmed milk.

Time Series Graphs

Currently, time series graphs are the only data visualization used to describe data. There are two types of time series. The first, seen in the results example above, is a light weight graph intended to help the user understand the overall shape of the data. While this graph is small it is fully interactive. Mousing over the lines in the graph will temporarily select them, causing their label to be presented at the top of the graph area. In addition, interaction with the mouse will update the x and y values - the position of the pointer in the data.

Note how, in this example, one of the graph lines is displayed with a different style than the others. This line is highlighted automatically as a result of the label containing part of the query. In this case the line label contains the text 'skimmed milk'.

By highlighting the line in this fashion, the user can better decide if the graph and underlying data is going to be of interest.

The graph can be expanded to produce a larger, more active version. This expanded form exposes a set of functions that can be used to further explore the data.

The keep function keeps the selected line or lines on the graph, hiding all those time series which have not been selected.

The smooth function applies a smoothing operation to the selected line or lines.

Tables

As with the time series graphs, there are two forms of table available as the result of a query. The first is a snippet - a quote from the underlying data table. This is intended to provide an excerpt of the data to help the user quickly determine if it might be of interest.

Clicking on show full table will bring up the full table, allowing the user to examine it in detail.