GalwayDashboard.ie – exploring Galway with data visualisation

The official launch of GalwayDashboard.ie happened in July. The dashboard, which I designed and developed, was part of an Economic Baseline Assessment project led by the Whitaker Institute, in collaboration with Galway City and Galway County Councils.

The objective was to pull together open data that was available about Galway, and present it in a useful, interactive and user-friendly manner. The audiences for project were quite different, ranging from policy analysts in the councils, to external stakeholders being consulted on the development of economic plans, to interested citizens of the city and county, who would like to find out more about their local environment, and compare it to surrounding locales.

To cater for these different audiences, data is presented in a number of ways – in the case of the CSO Census data, panels are used for each metric. A large headline figure is given – this can be a total, or a high (or low) number of interest based on what metric is being viewed; the data is then charted, and options to view the source data table, and where relevant, to map the dataset are given, alongside a direct link to that panel, should the user wish to share it.

The dashboard is made up of a large number of interactive visualisations of different types. This interactivity allows users to create views of the data that are relevant to themselves, such as through using the Compare Tool (shown below), which provides an easy way to compare some high level data on a number of different locations.

The dashboard covers a variety of location specific data, such as that drawn from the CSO Census, along with Enterprise, Social & Cultural, and Environmental data.

Along with the web-based visualisations, the project delivered reports on a variety of industry sectors, along with white papers on issues relevant to the City & County’s economic development.

As an aside, the dark image featured on the homepage banner maps the location every company in Galway City and County.