Creating an Open Data Application for Sustainability Education: Globe-Town Jack H Townsend Richard Gomer Andrea Prieto University of Southampton William Fyson j.townsend@soton.ac.uk Dominic Hobson Gail Taylor Huw Fryer Nigel Shadbolt University of Southampton University of Southampton between the global and local level, to help bring home what their 1. Abstract discoveries mean to them personally. Globe-Town.org is an information visualisation using open data, designed to convey the connections between economics, society Globe-Town uses World Bank open data [8], integrated with and environment in a globalising world. It informs about global other data sources to provide a multi-faceted picture of all of challenges whilst being easy and enjoyable to use. It aims to sustainable development and climate change in particular, in all motivate to act by showing how an intensifying network of the countries of the world. Its design reflects the conventional linkages connects global sustainability issues to the home organisation of sustainable development into the economy, country of the user, and the topics that they care about. Globe- society and the environment, visualizing many aspects of each, Town’s central innovation in interaction design is how it for each country (Figure 2, Figure 3). The software is designed combines visualisation of the properties of the individual to make the information easy and enjoyable to explore. Globe- country with a listing of the countries that are most strongly Town shows how networks of relationships between countries connected to it by a chosen type of relationship. This shows how (such as trade, aid, travel & migration) connect the user with ties of trade, migration, communication and culture increasingly distant places in an era of increasing globalisation. These links connect countries, sharing the risks, responsibilities and may transmit the risks of issues like climate change around the opportunities of issues like climate change. Globe-Town takes a globe (e.g., the impact of the 2011 Thai floods on the Japanese domain-specific storytelling approach to information economy [28]). They can also transmit the responsibilities for visualisation, co-creating hypermedia narratives of sustainability causing it (e.g., the embodied energy in exports from China and globalisation along with the user. Having sufficient open [14]), and provide opportunities to act to mitigate and to adapt data availability is found to be highly valuable, as it prevents effectively (e.g., investing in renewable energy projects abroad). understanding of these expansive interdisciplinary problems Globe-Town creates a metaphor between the familiar idea of being stymied by arbitrary limits of data access. Globe-Town neighbours in a town, and the relations between countries, has won second place in the Linked Up Veni Open Education represented them as a simple row of houses in a street. Globe- competition and third place in the finals of the World Bank's Town is a data visualisation based on PHP, MySQL, AJAX and Apps for Climate competition. This article describes the Globe- the Google Charts API that brings together many intuitive Town application in detail, along with the numerous online data design elements in order to make the information engaging. resources that have enabled it, and the design and development Globe-Town was awarded second place in the Linked Up Veni process through which it was created. Open Education competition at a ceremony in Geneva in 2013. It won third place in the finals of the World Bank's Apps for Keywords Climate competition [34]. Sustainability; Sustainable Development; Sustainability Education; Environment; Climate Change; Economics; Trade; 3. Background International Development; Complexity; Globalisation; This project builds upon the new field of ICT for sustainability Information Visualisation; Open Data; Linked Open Data; Web [13], and sits at the intersection of web science [5] and Science; Education; Human-Computer Interaction; Hypertext sustainability science [16]. It originates from the lead author’s Narratives; Web Design. research into the use of web technologies to advance environmental sustainability and respond to climate change, and 2. Introduction builds upon Tomlinson’s analysis of the role of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) in sustainability education, Globe-Town http://www.globe-town.org is a web application in both formal and informal settings [30]. and an interactive information visualisation using open data designed to convey the complex linkages of sustainable Interest in the use of open data for environmental sustainability development in a globalising world. In particular, it aims to [31, 36] is at an early stage, and has mainly focussed on inform people about environmental challenges, and to motivate promoting pro-environmental behaviours, good governance and them to act, by showing how the intensifying network of more sustainable consumption through greater accountability [7, linkages connect global sustainability issues to the users home 17, 32]. Open data may promote efficient use of resources - such country and the topics that they care about, finding “narrative as in smart cities [4]. The role of open data in innovation and the threads” of sustainability. The user can bridge the divide of scale transition to sustainability has received some attention [3, 25], as has its role in science for sustainability [9]. There is a nascent references a place that has been heavily shaped by the forces of international open sustainability community [20, 22]. However, globalisation, in the East of London, UK. In particular, it is at we are aware of little research into using open data for the heart of the British-Bangladeshi community. The animated sustainability communication and education. film created to introduce Globe-Town [33] draws heavily on the connections and contrasts between East London and Dhaka, 4. Method and Concept Development Bangladesh through the lives of two characters. Linked for The methodology is one of research through design, originating centuries by the globalising forces of colonisation, trade, from Human Computer Interaction (HCI) [37]. Zapico has migration and cultural exchange, they are also both low-lying adapted this into the following steps: grounding, ideation, and prone to flooding. However, whilst the UK has been able to iteration and reflection [35]. Research through design “uses invest in large-scale engineering to counteract the growing design artifacts as outcomes to transform the world from its effects of climate change such as sea-level rise and increased current state to a preferred state.”, and its main characteristics precipitation, Bangladesh faces regular flooding and its are a focus on creating, an implicitly normative stance and the population of 150 million face an uncertain future, with addressing of wicked problems [35]. implications for its “neighbours” - including the UK. With Globe-Town, the user can explore such narratives of global The core concept was developed over several weeks through a change. research through design process, and also with reference to the Getting Things Done project planning process [1]. The first two steps provide grounding. The aim of the project was defined, the 5. The User Experience purpose and principles. This was to find a novel and engaging Globe-Town is a way of viewing information about the way of taking on aspects of climate change with a web countries of the world and exploring how they are connected. It application. Secondly, a clear vision was developed of what a integrates these two perspectives of country and relationship, so successful outcome would be like. Success criteria included the user can surf links from country-to-country around the being intuitive and enjoyable to use, and the utilisation of open world, like surfing the Web. Overall it follows the “Visual data. Information-Seeking Mantra: overview first, zoom and filter, then details on demand.” [26]. Research into information Most effort was expended on the next two steps of ideation in visualisation has begun to move away from generic data analysis order to identify a powerful central concept for the application. tools towards more overt storytelling with information [2, 19]. Brainstorming was used to suggest many potentially relevant Globe-Town takes this more designed and domain-specific topics, which were jotted down on small pieces of paper. These approach, actively narrating between user and data through the included varied aspects of sustainable development and climate use of selected imagery to engage with ideas and emotions. The change themselves, and the challenges they create such as resulting stories are co-created by both designer and user, planning, energy efficiency or education. The requirements of forming a hypermedia narrative [6]. the Apps for Climate competition were noted down along with the form and subject matter of open data available. The lead 5.1 Relationships Between Countries author’s research into the ways that web technologies can When you select a country at the top of the main page, followed advance sustainability provided many ideas, as did consideration by a relationship between countries - such as trade - Globe- of the incentives for users to engage with the site. Town displays the countries that are most strongly connected to the selected country via that relationship (Figure 1). These The resulting concepts were organised and rearranged ‘neighbouring’ countries are represented as houses along a continually, in order to stimulate the imagination by creating street, with the size and proximity to the selected country’s novel combinations of concepts [11]. The core concept emerged house indicating the strength of the relationship. Many of the from considering the country focus of the open data available, relationships are of general interest, and several offer insights of alongside the centrality of the interplay between sustainability particular relevance to climate change mitigation (air travel, and globalisation, in particular how the global nature of the trade in fossil fuels, electricity, wood, meat or concrete) or the atmosphere redistributes risks, and how the global economy sharing of climate change risk and ability to adapt (aid, overall challenges notions of responsibility for climate change due to trade, or investment flows). The first 25 partner countries are the embodied energy of exported products. The design therefore shown, both going to the selected country (e.g. imports) and focuses on both the nature of countries and the relationships coming from it (e.g. exports). between them, sharing the risks, responsibilities and opportunities of climate change in a globalising world. Once the core concept was identified, wireframes of the interface were sketched and iterated through informal discussion with potential users. Once a promising user experience was designed, we returned to brainstorming and organising and finally identification of next steps in order to create a plan of action to build and iterate the software over a three-week period. The assembled team of six included software architecture and Figure 1 – A screenshot of a section of the Globe-Town.org development skills, graphic and user experience design and homepage, showing trade relationships between China and project planning. its most prominent trading partners, represented metaphorically as a street of neighbouring houses. The developing interface design, combined with the focus on Importers from China are shown on the right in order of relationships led to the analogy with being neighbours in a street level of trade, with houses sized accordingly. Exporters to of houses. In turn, this led to choice of Globe-Town as a name, China are similarly shown on the left. Dropdowns allow the that expresses the interplay between the global and the local, and type of relation to be changed (to e.g. migration or air sustainable development: economic development, social travel), as well as the country and year. development, and environmental protection. 5.2 All about the Country in Question 5.3 All about a Particular Indicator for a Moving down the page, the user can discover much more about Country the selected country and the challenges and opportunities that it Clicking on a country indicator opens up the indicator panel, faces in a changing world (Figure 2). The grouping of these where you can compare the chosen country to others for this indicators, like life expectancy and economic growth, enables particular indicator (e.g. a comparison of life expectancy to the user to explore the three interdependent components of other countries). The indicator is compared to the countries with sustainable development in that country: the environment, the highest and lowest values, and with the countries most society and the economy (Figure 3). The careful labelling, closely connected to the selected country by the selected sorting, colouring and imagery of the indicators are designed to relationship (e.g. its most active trading partners). How the maximise the clarity of where this country sits relative to the indicators vary around the world and how they have changed rest. Two Creative Commons licensed images were chosen for over time is conveyed via further simple data visualisations and each indicator to communicate either higher or lower than the a choropleth world map. average for all countries, and where possible to create narratives that connect with the users personal experience and actions. For instance, where energy use per person was above the global countries average, this is represented with a large car. Where it was below the global average, it is represented by people cycling. For each indicator, countries were divided into six equal groups containing 16.66 percentiles each: high/low, quite high/low and above/below average. This categorisation works less well when data is very sparse for that year, or when many countries share the same value such as zero. All countries are counted equally regardless of very large differences in scale. The most extreme, and therefore potentially most interesting indicators for the selected country were ordered to the top of the column in order to be initially visible without scrolling. Figure 4 – The Indicator Panel, showing how the selected indicator (the proportion of energy use from fossil fuels) in Switzerland compares to other countries, and has reduced over time. Figure 2 – Lower half of the Globe-Town homepage showing 6. System Architecture and Data Sourcing the detailed visualisation of the relative social, environmental and economic situation of the selected country, in this case China, presented in an engaging and readily understood visual style. Figure 5 – System Architecture of Globe-Town. Globe-Town is a PHP application that uses the MySQL database server to store the data. A conventional RDBMS was chosen over semantic web technologies such as a triple store for a combination of performance and maintainability. The flexibility offered by other data storage approaches was not required given the very structured way in which Globe-Town makes use of the data. The Globe-Town interface makes extensive use of Javascript Figure 3 – A version of the conventional diagram of the and AJAX to provide a responsive web app that does not require three “interdependent and mutually reinforcing pillars" of frequent page reloads. This was particularly important given the value placed on making Globe-Town easily accessible and in adaptation index is then calculated as the readiness score of a providing a good user experience. Charts were produced using country minus its vulnerability score, normalised from 0 to 100. the Google Charts API which enabled fast information visualisation. Performance limitations of Google Charts mean Whilst it was preferred to use the data as provided with minimal that future iterations would benefit from substituting more processing, in order to develop the narratives around climate change mitigation, the relative potential of countries for the powerful visualisation tools such as D3.js. deployment of wind and solar energy were sought. For this, it was necessary to undertake a GIS analysis of data on wind 6.1 Sourcing indicator data speeds and insolation sourced from NASA via SWERA [27]. Country indicators are the predominant data available on the The accuracy of the result is limited; the data has a relatively World Bank’s open data portal [29] i.e. a data point for each low spatial resolution and does not include offshore areas.. country allowing comparisons between them and across a very broad range of characteristics. The focus on countries provides a One design challenge that could be better tackled in a future useful common data structure to compare many topics, and suits version of the application is to allow the user to switch between the global perspective of international bodies. Statecraft has all country total values to values per person, or indeed to per neatly divided the physical geography of the planet into a unit area, or per unit GDP. At the moment these are mixed side- limited set of relatively well-defined entities, albeit of highly by-side, which may be confusing, especially when comparing contrasting sizes. This has enabled the World Bank to amass a large countries with small ones. rich compendium of datasets from many different organisations with the same structure, and enables Globe-Town’s core 6.2 Sourcing relationship data interaction design. However, such simplification comes as a The World Bank’s own Data Bank site provided a matrix of data cost; much information is lost in averaging over a whole about migration between countries. However, the most country. Similarly data is averaged over a whole year, so interesting country relationship data – trade – was sourced from potentially large variations within these ranges of time and UN Comtrade [10]. In contrast to the other sources uses, this space can be lost, especially for large countries with great was not explicitly open data, with opaque terms of use, so internal variations in physical or human geography, such as the permission had to be requested directly from the organisation. USA or China. The effort involved illustrated the chilling effect of closed data Most of the datasets in Globe-Town were easily sourced from on data reuse, and it is clear that this project would have been in the World Bank indicator site. Not only does this provide a no way possible without the broad provision of overtly open convenient technical standardisation, but also reassurance about data. data quality and clear metadata on provenance – which is Uploading overall trade data and trade in particular types of reproduced for the user at the bottom of Globe-Town’s indicator product of relevance to climate – such as the fossil fuel trade – panel. was fairly straightforward. Data on the connections created Nevertheless, in order to support the richness of climate change between countries by modern air travel was of great value to both the climate change and globalisation narratives. This was narratives intended for the application, it was necessary to fulfil several specific data requirements from other sources and even sourced from the Open Flights community of enthusiasts [23], undertake considerable data processing to produce some of and algorithms were applied to calculate the distance on the them. This was certainly helped by the general use of standard surface of a sphere between origin and destination. The country codes such as ISO 3166-1 in most of the extra datasets displayed statistic shows the cumulative length of recorded found. However, not all datasets used standard codes - some airline routes between countries. This approach provides both a simply provided names, which had to be carefully matched friendly way of visualising the intensity of traffic, and a where possible using lookup tables of country name variations reminder of the astronomical distances being traversed. [24]. Data on international aid was sourced from the OECD [21], and The World Bank Climate Change Knowledge Portal [8] thus includes only aid donated by OECD countries. However provided data on predicted 2040-2060 temperature and this is likely to make up the majority. precipitation levels obtained from the World Bank site, It is technically easy to extend Globe-Town to include other originating from the 2007 IPCC report [15]. This was deemed datasets for both indicators and relationships. It could be valuable to connect the user with the predictions of climate developed into a generic tool, or focus on a new specific changes in store for their own country. Considerable averaging domain. Data on international tourism could be readily included. had to be employed in order to generate the singular indicators One dataset of particular interest was investigated, but no good required for the application. The arithmetic mean was taken of source of data could be found for it: the level of internet traffic the projected median increase in temperatures or precipitation between countries. across all models, for two scenarios (a2 & b1), across all months of the year and the two-decade period in order to give just one 7. Future Work figure for comparing countries. The data is of course subject to the uncertainties, precautions, assumptions and scenario 7.1 User Testing parameters pertaining to such predictive climate simulation. Globe-Town is in its first version. The priority for the project is systematic user testing in schools as a basis for iterative Information on the vulnerability of countries to climate-related refinement and assessment of the design. Testing could assess: hazards and their readiness to adapt to the challenges posed by 1) how users’ understanding of and 2) concern for sustainability climate change and other global forces were sourced from the issues develop, and ideally 3) whether it led to any change in GAIN Index [12]. GAIN quantifies the countries readiness to behaviour; and even 4) resulting sustainability impact [18]; adapt to climate change, as well as its vulnerability to it. The finally, 5) whether it is engaging and useful, by being both fun and functional. For significant sustainability impact, it will need resulting visualisation allows the user to surf from country to to appeal to those not previously interested in sustainability country as they might surf from page to page on the Web. It also issues. Further conclusions could therefore be drawn into allows the user to explore the links that sustainable development designing other information visualisations for sustainability makes between many different subjects, such as atmospheric education. science and economics. The interactivity of Globe-Town thus enables the user to explore the wicked problems of sustainable 7.2 Features development: the synergies and trade-offs, agreements and Ideas for the development of the application include increasing discords between its different facets, the environment, society the richness of available data and the ways of combining and and the economy. The availability of sufficient open data is interrogating the data. The system can be easily generalised with found to be highly valuable, as it prevents understanding of the inclusion of more indicators to increase the coverage of these expansive interdisciplinary problems being stymied by social and economic aspects in order to produce a tool of even arbitrary limits of data access. greater general interest for education in subjects such as geography, economics and politics. Globe-Town was created using many country indicator datasets sourced by the World Bank open data portal from diverse Globe-Town includes a central user experience innovation in the origins. In order to support the intended narratives of climate visualisation of networks, allowing the user to consider the change and globalisation, it was necessary to also source several nature of an individual item alongside the items most strongly datasets elsewhere. These included datasets for different connected to it by a particular relationship. The user can then relationship such as trade, trade in particular products, air travel surf from item to item and thus explore the relationships. This and international aid. It also included particular country approach may be of value to exploring a broad range of different indicators - some of which had to be calculated - such as the items linked in networks, such as companies in an economy, impacts of climate change on a country, or the potential for a molecules in the metabolism or species in an ecosystem. It particular renewable energy technology. would be very simple to adapt it to these alternative domains. Beyond user testing and iterative refinement of the application, Another development avenue for the existing sustainability- ideas for development include enabling users not just to learn, focussed system would be to enable users not just to learn, but to but to contribute to the content, communicate with each other contribute to the content, communicate with each other and take and take action. They can then go beyond exploring their action. This will allow them to go beyond exploring global links existing international links to forging new ones. to creating new ones. 8. Conclusions 9. References Globe-Town is a web application and an interactive information [1] Allen, D. 2001. Getting things done. Viking. visualisation using open data that aims to inform people about [2] Badawood, D. 2012. 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