Recently, the European Union released an overview of its allocated grants in 2007. What stunned me was the sheer incomprehensibility and the lacking navigability of the data. How am I supposed to make sense of this?

I decided to make some simple tagclouds to gain insight. The first hurdle was to obtain all data. I could only get 500 records at a time, so I had to click 56 times to get the 28000 record data. I then had to parse it all and put it into one big tab separated file to be able to analyse it (I actually stored in a database but provide the tsv for others who’d like to do an analysis).

Once everything was in the database it was a breeze to make the tagclouds. At tools.issuecrawler.net/beta/one/european_grants/ you can easily generate and analyse them yourself. It still is a lousy interface, I admit. A proper information designer will do better.

What does become clear however, is that with really simple visualization techniques the data becomes insightful. I can now easily see which countries have gotten most money (and that a lot of non-EU countries also get a lot of money):

That ICT companies have gotten the most grants and that a lot of grants are confidential:

And that non-nuclear joint research is more important than nuclear joint research. Also, Media and Citizens seem really important:

These are only a tiny fraction of the conclusions which can be drawn from these simple visualizations. Mine is thus a plea to the European Union to provide a way for its citizens to explore the data. After all, as seen in the last visualization, the EU deems us important