The Gamma Data Exploration through Iterative Prompting

Tomas Petricek

Unpublished draft

Governments, non-profit organizations and citizen initiatives publish increasing amounts of data, but extracting insights from such data and presenting them to the public is hard. First, data comes in a variety of formats that each requires a different tool. Second, many data exploration tools do not reveal how a result was obtained, making it difficult to reproduce the results and check how they were obtained.

We contribute The Gamma, a novel data exploration environment for non-experts. The Gamma is based on a single interaction principle and using it results in transparent and reproducible scripts. This allows transfer of knowledge from one data source to another and learning from previously created data analyses. We evaluate the usability and learnability of The Gamma through a user study on non-technical employees of a research institute. We argue that the our approach allows journalists and the public to benefit from the rise of open data, by making data exploration easier, more transparent and more reproducible.

Draft and more information

• Download the draft paper (PDF)

Comments are welcome!

If you have any comments, suggestions or related ideas, I'll be happy to hear from you! Send me an email at tomas@tomasp.net or get in touch via Twitter at @tomaspetricek.