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Sharing data on public services could have serious consequences unless the material has been valued, maintained and protected and the original reasons for its collection have been taken into account, the Information Society Alliance (Eurim), has warned. In a report on the quality of public sector information, the group says that the drive to put central and local government data online, open to public scrutiny, has revealed the long standing problems with quality that lie behind the reluctance of some departments and agencies to trust one another's data. It adds that it is important that decisions on spending cuts are based on good quality information.

An important article. Please read.

The Dirty Energy Money tool provides an illustration of the network of funding relationships between Dirty Energy companies and politicians. You can use the interactive network map to explore our database campaign contribution relationships. Politicians and companies are positioned by their relationships, those that are close together tend to have similar patterns of giving and receiving.

Welcome to Graphviz Available translations:Belorussian What is Graphviz? Graphviz is open source graph visualization software. Graph visualization is a way of representing structural information as diagrams of abstract graphs and networks. It has important applications in networking, bioinformatics, software engineering, database and web design, machine learning, and in visual interfaces for other technical domains. Features The Graphviz layout programs take descriptions of graphs in a simple text language, and make diagrams in useful formats, such as images and SVG for web pages, PDF or Postscript for inclusion in other documents; or display in an interactive graph browser. (Graphviz also supports GXL, an XML dialect.) Graphviz has many useful features for concrete diagrams, such as options for colors, fonts, tabular node layouts, line styles, hyperlinks, rolland custom shapes.

8 must-reads detail how to verify information in real-time, from social media, users Craig Silverman by Craig Silverman Published Apr. 27, 2012 7:46 am Updated Apr. 27, 2012 9:23 am Over the past couple of years, I've been trying to collect every good piece of writing and advice about verifying social media content and other types of information that flow across networks. This form of verification involves some new tools and techniques, and requires a basic understanding of the way networks operate and how people use them. It also requires many of the so-called old school values and techniques that have been around for a while: being skeptical, asking questions, tracking down high quality sources, exercising restraint, collaborating and communicating with team members. For example, lots of people talk about how Andy Carvin does crowdsourced verification and turns his Twitter feed into a real time newswire. Lost in the discussion is the fact that Carvin also develops sources and contacts on the ground and stays in touch with them on Skype and through other means. What you see on Twitter is only one part of the process. Some things never go out of style. At the same time, there are new tools, techniques and approaches every journalist should have in their arsenal. Fortunately, several leading practitioners of what I sometimes call the New Verification are gracious and generous about sharing what they know. One such generous lot are the folks at Storyful, a social media curation and verification operation that works with clients such as Reuters, ABC News, and The New York Times, among others. I wrote about them last year and examined how in some ways they act as an outsourced verification service for newsrooms. That was partly inspired by this post from Storyful founder Mark Little: I find it helps to think of curation as three central questions: * Discovery: How do we find valuable social media content? * Verification: How do we make sure we c

What is BuzzData? Data should be free-flowing, well-organized and easy to share. Wouldn't it be nice if there was a place where you could store, share and show off your data with just a couple of mouse clicks? BuzzData lets you publish your data in a smarter, easier way. Instead of juggling versions and overwriting files, use BuzzData and enjoy a social network designed for data."

LittleSis is a free database detailing the connections between powerful people and organizations. We bring transparency to influential social networks by tracking the key relationships of politicians, business leaders, lobbyists, financiers, and their affiliated institutions. We help answer questions such as: Who do the wealthiest Americans donate their money to? Where did White House officials work before they were appointed? Which lobbyists are married to politicians, and who do they lobby for? All of this information is public, but scattered. We bring it together in one place. Our data derives from government filings, news articles, and other reputable sources. Some data sets are updated automatically; the rest is filled in by our user community. More Features »

Who can use Twiangulate? Job Seekers Looking for an "in" at a company or trying to learn which tweeps might influence the hiring manager or boss? Or looking for tweeps at target companies or industries in a certain location? Twiangulate has you covered. Journalists Want to find hidden relationships or linchpin players in an industry? Maybe you're looking for sources in a microniche? Or who's most followed at a conference? Twiangulate does it all. Tech Junkies Want to know who your most influential Twitter followers are? Love social network mapping? Want to know when two tweeps start following the same person? Twiangulate!

How to: verify content from social media Experts advise on the process of verification Posted: 3 April 2012 By: Rachel McAthy 0 Comments and 0 Reactions Facebook and Twitter for how to There are a wealth of questions, tools and techniques journalists can use to verify content from social media The mass of information now available and being shared online offers a fantastic arena for journalists to engage with online communities and pick up on breaking news at the same time. This means journalists are also having to sharpen their verification and fact-checking skills in a digital environment. This how-to features advice from a panel of experts on the key considerations, questions and tools journalists should have in mind when carrying out verification of content that surfaces via social media, be it a news tip, an image, a piece of audio or video. The process covers three main stages: monitoring of social networks and the online community before news breaks, checking the content when it comes into play and subsequently reporting that content once verified. The comprehensive advice outlined in this how-to guide offers practical steps, specific questions and cross-checks journalists can make at each stage, as well as online tools to support them.

Good tool, but only runs on Ubuntu - presentation BigBlueButton WebFWD ("Web Forward") is Mozilla's Open Innovation program. We support Open Source projects which extend the Web - providing participants with mentorship from industry experts, access to the Mozilla global network, as well as infrastructure and other world-class resources.

What is it? A social analytics platform which contains over 1,000 days of tweets (all 70 billion of them), Facebook activity and blog posts. How is it of use to journalists? "Journalists can easily develop real-time insights into any story from Playground," PeopleBrowsr UK CEO Andrew Grill explains. Complex keyword searches can be divided by user influence, geolocation, sentiment, and virtual communities of people with shared interests and affinities. These features - and many more - let reporters and researchers easily drill down to find the people and content driving the conversation on social networks on any subject. Playground lets you use the data the way you want to use it. You can either export the graphs and tables that the site produces automatically or export the results in a CSV file to create your own visualisations, which could potentially make it the next favourite tool of data journalists. Grill added: The recent launch of our fully transparent Kred influencer platform will make it faster and easier for journalists to find key influencers in a particular community. You can give Playground a try for the first 14 days before signing up for one of their subscriptions ($19 a month for students and journalists, $149 for organisations and companies).

The Investigative Dashboard (ID) is a work in progress, that is designed to showcase the potential for collaboration and data-sharing between investigative reporters across the world. The initiative is spearheaded by the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, the Romanian Center for Investigative Journalism, the Forum for African Investigative Reporters and the International Center for Journalists, and will expand to include other institutional members of the Global Investigative Journalism Network. The project is coordinated by Paul Cristian Radu (of OCCRP and CRJI) and Justin Arenstein (of FAIR) and was developed while both were in residence at Stanford University as Knight fellows. The John S. Knight Fellowships for Professional Journalists made possible the ID by providing access to the know-how of co-fellow journalists and of experts at Stanford University and in Silicon Valley. This first iteration of the ID website shares detailed methodologies, resources, and links for journalists to track money, shareholders, and company ownership across international borders. It also shares video tutorials, and other tools, to help journalists navigate often rapidly evolving data-sources. Future versions of ID will offer more advanced collaborative workspaces, data-archives, and discounted (or, where possible, free) access to expensive or proprietary research services. But, perhaps most importantly, the ID will campaign for investigative centres across the world to collaborate with each other to improve the depth and impact of their reportage.

Site available in Spanish and English Medialab-Prado is a program of the Department of Arts of the City Council of Madrid, aimed at the production, research, and dissemination of digital culture and of the area where art, science, technology, and society intersect. Many workshops for the production of projects, conferences, seminars, encounters, project exhibition, concerts, presentations, etc. take place in its versatile space. All activities are free and open to the general public. Our primary objective is to create a structure where both research and production are processes permeable to user participation. To that end, Medialab-Prado offers: A permanent information, reception, and meeting space attended by cultural mediators. Open calls for the presentation of proposals and participation in the collaborative development of projects. We have several on-going programmes, which are as follows: Interactivos?: creative uses of electronics and programming Inclusiva.net: research and reflections on the network culture Visualizar: data visualization tools and strategies Commons Lab: trans-disciplinary discussion on the Commons AVLAB: audio-visual and sound creation http://medialab-prado.es/article/que_es

Goals and Topics Our goal with this workshop is to bring together data storytellers from diverse disciplines and continue the conversation of how these different fields utilize each other's techniques and articulate principles for telling data narratives. Our target participants are researchers, journalists, bloggers, and others who seek to understand how visualizations support narrative, stories, and other communicative goals. Participants may be designers of such visualizations or designers of tools that support the creation of narrative visualizations. Visualizations that serve as a "community mirror" and thus create opportunities for discussion, reflection and sharing within a social network are also suitable topics. While we are inspired by many visualizations that display personal histories and storylines, our focus is on visualization situated in storytelling contexts, not necessarily visualizations of stories. Specific topics of interest may include, but are not limited to: Media and genres Embedding visualizations in social media to tell stories Multimodal storytelling with visualization (e.g. narrated or acted visualization, such as Rosling's Gapminder presentations) Non-traditional narrative - games and other procedural narratives incorporating data Visualization in (data)journalism - how news stories and visualization can complement each other Visualizations that support specific types of stories: Personal stories ("Here's a history of my cancer treatment") Community and collaboration stories ("How has our Facebook group changed over the past year?") Public data sets and narrative ("What is your Senator doing with your taxes?") Fictional, semi-fictional, and non-fiction stories

Enclosure diagrams are also space-filling, using containment rather than adjacency to represent the hierarchy. As with adjacency diagrams, the size of any node in the tree is quickly revealed. Although circle packing does not use space as efficiently as a treemap, the "wasted" space effectively reveals the hierarchy. At the same time, node sizes can be rapidly compared using area judgments. By flattening the hierarchy, the pack layout can also be used to create bubble charts.

Perception: Gestalt Laws Home → Data visualization for Excel users → Perception: Gestalt Laws Every chart starts with a table. We transcribe this table into a visual representation of distances between data points: the "origin chart". That's when our "eye-brain system" starts making assumptions. It assumes that data points are somewhat related, even if they are not:

WHAT WE DO We build software that allows organizations to make sense of massive amounts of disparate data. We solve the technical problems, so they can solve the human ones. Combating terrorism. Prosecuting crimes. Fighting fraud. Eliminating waste. From Silicon Valley to your doorstep, we deploy our data fusion platforms against the hardest problems we can find, wherever we are needed most.

How Overview turns Documents into Pictures by Jonathan Stray on 06/04/2012 | 0 Overview produces intricate visualizations of large document sets - beautiful, but what do they mean? These visualizations are saying something about the documents, which you can interpret if you know a little about how they're plotted. There are two visualizations in the current prototype version of Overview, and both are based on document clustering.

They Rule Overview They Rule aims to provide a glimpse of some of the relationships of the US ruling class. It takes as its focus the boards of some of the most powerful U.S. companies, which share many of the same directors. Some individuals sit on 5, 6 or 7 of the top 1000 companies. It allows users to browse through these interlocking directories and run searches on the boards and companies. A user can save a map of connections complete with their annotations and email links to these maps to others. They Rule is a starting point for research about these powerful individuals and corporations. Context A few companies control much of the economy and oligopolies exert control in nearly every sector of the economy. The people who head up these companies swap on and off the boards from one company to another, and in and out of government committees and positions. These people run the most powerful institutions on the planet, and we have almost no say in who they are. This is not a conspiracy, they are proud to rule, yet these connections of power are not always visible to the public eye. Karl Marx once called this ruling class a 'band of hostile brothers.' They stand against each other in the competitve struggle for the continued accumulation of their capital, but they stand together as a family supporting their interests in perpetuating the profit system as whole. Protecting this system can require the cover of a 'legitimate' force - and this is the role that is played by the state. An understanding of this system can not be gleaned from looking at the inter-personal relations of this class alone, but rather how they stand in relation to other classes in society. Hopefully They Rule will raise larger questions about the structure of our society and in whose benefit it is run. The Data We do not claim that this data is 100% accurate at all times. Corporate directors have a habit of dying, quitting boards, joining new ones and most frustratingly passing on their name

I think this data must be very useful to the people in Occupy Wall Street