Abstract:
This thesis examines ways to make Open Data more open, more accessible and thus more useful to a wider audience. It begins with a Literature Review of Open Data in New Zealand to understand what data is out there and to identify what barriers currently exist that hinder the usage of the data. To address a major problem identified in the Literature Review, it then presents TableToLongForm, an R package that automatically converts hierarchical tables intended for a human reader into a simple longform dataframe that is machine readable, making it easier to access and use the data for analysis. Once data is in a useful format, one of the most effective ways to communicate it to a wider audience is through visualisations, so the thesis continues with a Literature Review of Graphical Tools examining what is currently available for creating web-based interactive graphics. It then presents WeBIPP a web- based interactive tool for building statistical graphics from scratch without writing any code. The graphical user interface can be used to build graphics from scratch, but as the user does this, they are not simply creating a graphic, they are writing code in the background. For those who have no coding knowledge, this fact can be ignored, making WeBIPP accessible to this audience. But for those who have coding knowledge, they can utilise it to examine the code, to tweak it and to reuse it. This makes WeBIPP much more powerful than other tools of similar nature. The thesis concludes with summarising remarks and possibilities for future work.