With the accumulation of large amounts of vital information surrounding the refugee communities in Lebanon, the current operational apparatus is facing unprecedented challenges in making sense of the deluge in data. In the majority of those instances the governmental sector in Lebanon is still largely lacking in the information systems expertise required to extract knowledge from this data in order to inform policy making. In this paper, we present an open, interactive visual interface to assist non-technical users in the exploratory data analysis of various types of data that are of vital significance. The intended purpose is to reduce the gap between producers of data and users of technology, and encourage evidence-based strategies for the refugee crisis management. In contrast to existing open visual platforms, our tool requires minimal technical expertise and effort, to the extent that not a single download or installation is needed. It also provides a user-friendly frontend and connects the user to data visualisation and analytics tools in the backend developed using Python. Our case studies reveal interesting revelations as a result of temporal and spatial phenomena, following the Syrian war and the influx of refugees into Lebanon.
@InProceedings{ABOUNABHAN18.3, author = {Michael Abounabhan and Fatima Abu Salem}, title = {Bridging the Gap between Data versus Technology Producers: An Interactive Visual Interface for Data Exploration}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the Eleventh International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2018)}, year = {2018}, month = {may}, date = {7-12}, location = {Miyazaki, Japan}, editor = {Mennatallah El-Assady and Annette Hautli-Janisz and Verena Lyding}, publisher = {European Language Resources Association (ELRA)}, address = {Paris, France}, isbn = {979-10-95546-13-9}, language = {english} }
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