Datalet-Ecosystem Provider (DEEP): Scalable Architecture for Reusable, Portable and User-Friendly Visualizations of Open Data

Abstract

This paper presents the DatalEt-Ecosystem Provider (DEEP), an extensible, and scalable Edge-centric architecture to visualize Open Data, retrieved in real time from institutional open data portals. The aim is to engage citizens and stakeholders through reusable, portable and interactive visualizations, named datalets. The DEEP architecture exploits the increasing computing power and capacity of end-users devices, moving the computation to process and visualize data, from the central server, directly to the client-side ensuring data trustiness, privacy, scalability and dynamic data loading. DEEP and its datalets have been fully exploited, in the ROUTE-TO-PA, HORIZON 2020 funded project, by five public administrations across Europe as pilot projects. The project engages and involves citizens in creating, sharing and commenting existing visualizations of Open Data. DEEP is open source, its source code is fully available on GitHub, thus every single component can be reused by other projects.