Compare your neighborhood’s amenities and crimes: Visualizing and comparing open data with R shiny on the municipal, neighborhood and borough level for citizens

Abstract

Many governments are making efforts to become more transparent. One of the ways in which this is achieved is by making open data available. However, the open data that is currently available in the Netherlands is not accessible for everyone. This research aims to make open data more accessible and understandable. This is done with the following research question: How can data about amenities and crime be visualized and compared in a way that each citizen can access and understand open data independently? To make open data more accessible, data is visualized and it is made possible to compare similar areas based on income or urbanity in an interactive way. The data that is used is about amenities and crime and consist of three levels: the municipal, neighborhood and borough level. With R shiny, a dashboard was made that made it possible to interact with the data and extract relevant data for the user. The dashboard that is produced can be used as tool to get more insight into community problems. However, there are indications that the use of this dashboard might still be hard for citizens with poor data skills or low digital literacy. While these challenges still exist, this research can be seen as a first step in making open data more accessible and understandable.