Government data is complex and enormous- so are the challenges facing those who work with it. With Tableau Desktop, you can query millions of rows of data in seconds, drag-and-drop to visualize any dataset, and even publish your analysis to Tableau Public to meet transparency reporting requirements. Governments and public-private organizations are using Tableau to.
- Present enormous countrywide datasets clearly and allow drill-down to local areas.
- Provide online access to public data without programming.
- Use Tableau's built-in mapping capability to visualize parks, services, accidents, pollution, and more.
- Achieve the functionality of online Flash visualizations without the development cost.
It is not uncommon to see government databases over a billion rows. That volume of data would take a casual Excel user days to wade through, much less understand or share. In many cases it would be altogether impossible.
Tableau takes the tedium out of government data by providing an easy-to-use drag and drop interface that anyone can master. And Tableau's Data Engine, a local data store optimized for analytics, lets you work with tens or hundreds of millions of records at interactive speed.
This visualization was made from a million-row national health database in less than an hour. It allows users to get a detailed view of the nationwide obesity epidemic and the factors that influence it. You can drill down to your own state. Select Washington using the drop down filter on the top right and notice that some counties in the southwest corner of the state are tinged deeply red. Click on the darkest of those dots (Pacific County).
The scatter plots below the map will show you that this high obesity rate may be related to an extremely high smoking rate and a low level of physical activity county wide. All of this interactivity works to simplify the massive database to a view that anyone can understand.
Making public data accessible to citizens is a struggle for every government organization. Unfortunately, it’s easy to waste precious time and resources on custom systems that fail to deliver.
Luckily, Tableau allows even a single person to efficiently visualize and publish data online. And not just as a flat file or as a table, but as a live, interactive visualization. Citizens can explore the analysis and download the underlying data.
The National Recovery and Reinvestment Act is one of the most well known government initiatives of the past decade. Naturally, citizens are curious about what stimulus money is being spent in their area and why. This application allows users to evaluate the efficiency of the stimulus (calculated as the number of jobs created per dollar spent) by simply selecting a state in the top left view.
More adventurous users can download the underlying dataset using the toolbar below the visualization. Perhaps most importantly, it only took an hour for a single person to create and share. This app could also be quickly modified with more detail for internal government use, allowing administrators to spot inefficiencies and address them before they become a problem.
Data is a critical component of many national conversations, but telling stories with data is not easy. Viewers quickly lose interest in data-intensive stories when not told well, or struggle to find information that is relevant to them. And telling stories well is hard: Flash and other online visualization tools require weeks of programming and are expensive.
Tableau lets you create interesting interactive visualizations that help people understand public data. Create beautiful applications that let people find their own stories: their own school or district, or their issue of interest.
This visualization shows the U.S. federal deficit projection between 2011 and 2022. The first dashboard shows an overview of projected deficit growth and projected revenue and spending; the second dashboard provides detailed breakdowns of the projected revenue sources and spending categories. Using the filter panel on the second tab lets you customize your results by spending category.
Until now, interactive visualizations have been the domain of nationwide media properties with the budget, time and resources for Flash. Sanjay Bhatt at the Seattle Times does not have any of those things, but with some Department Of Transportation data and Tableau he made this interactive visualization about biking accidents. The larger dots represent intersections with more biking accidents. Viewers can zoom into their own neighborhood using the tools below the visualization, or select points of interest for comparison.
The ability to easily and cheaply scale from local to global issues is one of the things that distinguishes Tableau from other solutions. As you can imagine, this mapping tool could be used to display any number of relevant city datasets, from parks and services, to crime and traffic.
Open Government projects are meant to empower advocacy groups and citizens. Unfortunately, most government datasets are so dense and difficult to work with that even a talented data worker is more overloaded than empowered. It’s like having a ream of paper, but no pen. With Tableau, non-profits, journalists and government workers can connect to interesting datasets and start finding stories and solving problems in minutes.
This visualization uses a nationwide public pension fund dataset to expose a massive budget shortfall in nearly every state. Users can interact with the viz by clicking on their state in the map, filtering the list below. Similarly, clicking on an item in the list highlights the state it is associated with. Without Tableau, time and data constraints would have otherwise relegated this amazing data to a spreadsheet.
State and local governments collect lots of data, and they’re searching for new ways to create visibility into that data for residents and businesses. With Tableau, it’s easy for governments to create beautiful and intuitive ways to explore that data, empowering the everyday user to make informed decisions from state and local government data, employment data, census data, demographic
data and more.
Without investing hundreds of expensive analyst and developer man-hours, governments can create transparency in their data, creating app-style tools that encourage exploration of data and answer specific questions.
With this app-style visualization, you can choose two counties in Maine, and compare them across trends in education, income and employment. The colorful charts and graphs created are based on U.S. Census data and data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis.
