Open Data Explorer: An End-to-end Tool for Data Storytelling using Open Data

Enabling users to better understand government actions is one reason why governments have sought to open their data to the public. Data storytelling tools help to achieve this goal by facilitating users to turn data into stories. However, existing tools are not able to provide the necessary features to overcome the barriers users face at different data storytelling stages. This paper provides findings regarding the features in the design of these data storytelling tools in the open data context and also presents a generic and end-to-end tool called ODE, which helps users through the different data storytelling stages. To achieve the paper's objectives, a literature review was first conducted to collect the features needed for the different data storytelling stages. Then, the identified features were integrated into ODE and its effectiveness in helping users to easily turn data into stories was demonstrated through an evaluation involving 11 users.