Creating an open data application for sustainability education: Globe-Town

Abstract

Globe-Town.org is an information visualisation using open data, designed to convey the connections between economics, society and environment in a globalising world. It informs about global challenges whilst being easy and enjoyable to use. It aims to motivate to act by showing how an intensifying network of linkages connects global sustainability issues to the home country of the user, and the topics that they care about. GlobeTown’s central innovation in interaction design is how it combines visualisation of the properties of the individual country with a listing of the countries that are most strongly connected to it by a chosen type of relationship. This shows how ties of trade, migration, communication and culture increasingly connect countries, sharing the risks, responsibilities and opportunities of issues like climate change. Globe-Town takes a domain-specific storytelling approach to information visualisation, co-creating hypermedia narratives of sustainability and globalisation along with the user. Having sufficient open data availability is found to be highly valuable, as it prevents understanding of these expansive interdisciplinary problems being stymied by arbitrary limits of data access. Globe-Town has won second place in the Linked Up Veni Open Education competition and third place in the finals of the World Bank's Apps for Climate competition. This article describes the GlobeTown application in detail, along with the numerous online data resources that have enabled it, and the design and development process through which it was created

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