Parliamentary Interruptions

Last week Sargasso had procured a dataset of interruptions from politicians in our House of Representatives. With the counts from which politician had interrupted which in debates they had made some nice infographics and a couple of blog posts. I thought this was the ideal opportunity to put all of the data (aggregated by party) in the D3 example chord diagram.

Never having used D3 before this was an ideal excuse to learn it and a near ideal dataset to employ. The result is as follows (click through for the interactive version):

This was featured on Sargasso the next day.

The graphic is not directly clear, but the data is deep and interesting enough to afford some exploration and it yields insight into the behaviours of various political parties during the reign of this cabinet. And what seems to matter a lot to people: it looks quite pretty.

With regard to D3, I think I will use it more often. It works quite similar to Protovis with which we have done some stuff before, but it feels much more current. Protovis itself is discontinued in favor of D3 according to a notice on the site and D3 seems a very worth successor.

Opinion piece on public transportation data in Dutch newspaper NRC.next

Yesterday Dutch daily newspaper NRC.next published an opinion piece I’d written for them concerning Dutch public transportation information. Alexander Klöpping had written a piece before and mine was to be a more specific follow-up on a certain kind of information: transit.

The situation is that Dutch transit information is controlled by a single private entity who are not sharing any of their data. The Dutch government plans to write a tender for a public data warehouse (to be called: NDOV) to be built with all transit information in it. Now this is both a threat for the private institution currently exploiting the data and an opportunity for the Netherlands to make a —much needed— jump forward in the realm of transit information. Which makes this an interesting turning point.

After making the altogether clear and well-known argument for open transit data, I propose three hard requirements such a data warehouse should fulfill. Here in English:

1. All public transit data: journey plans, live locations, departure times and (un)planned mutations in the NDOV have to be readable both for humans on a website and for computers via an API.
2. All this data has to be freely accessible to everybody without limitations.
3. There always has to be a high quality journey planner but others have to be allowed to build their own or build on top of it.

Doesn’t sound too unreasonable, does it?

Full text in Dutch on Alper’s personal weblog for those interested.