Governor: Turning Open Government Data Portals into Interactive Databases

The launch of open governmental data portals (OGDPs) has popularized the open data movement of last decade. Although the amount of data in OGDPs is increasing, their functionalities are limited to finding datasets with titles/descriptions and downloading the actual files. This hinders the end users, especially those without technical skills, to find the open data tables and make use of them. We present Governor, an open-sourced[17] web application developed to make OGDPs more accessible to end users by facilitating searching actual records in the tables, previewing them directly without downloading, and suggesting joinable and unionable tables to users based on their latest working tables. Governor also manages the provenance of integrated tables allowing users and their collaborators to easily trace back to the original tables in OGDP. We evaluate Governor with a two-part user study and the results demonstrate its value and effectiveness in finding and integrating tables in OGDP.