At Opendatasoft, we are dedicated to finding new ways to make your data travel around the world and be easily accessed & reused by your citizens or customers, for example through APIs or easily-shareable visualizations. Today we make it even easier for your data to get in everyone's hands.
We launched ODS-Widgets: an open-source web toolkit to help you easily build interactive visualizations or applications with your data.
By releasing this set of building blocks, which were previously only used internally at Opendatasoft, we intend to:
- provide new tools to help our customers improve the visibility and impact of their datasets inside and/or outside their organization
- initiate and grow a community of developers and partners that will use ODS-Widgets and can enrich the toolkit with new widgets.
There are currently more than 20 available widgets, including:
- a table view of a dataset
- a map displaying points of interests
- an analytic display of a dataset using aggregations
- a calendar to filter data on a specific time range
- a tag cloud of keywords or any facet.
Many of these widgets can interact with one another (e.g. clicking on a map can trigger a search query), allowing you to build a completely interactive page where everything stays consistent.
Enabling ODS-Widgets on your own pages is as simple as loading two files; all the rest comes from APIs. Anyone with access to the data can just directly use the widgets with it.
Here is a quick example on how to display a map of events with the ability to filter the time window (also available on Plunker):
ODS-Widgets is a comprehensive set of components (usable as HTML tags) that can be "plugged" in your data and combined with one another to build more advanced data visualizations, dashboards, search pages... As they are simple web elements, they work the same on mobile and desktop browsers; they also make it easy to port and reuse visualizations & dashboards across multiple datasets or APIs.
These widgets can be plugged in any Opendatasoft API and two widgets can use two different sources, making it easy to build, for example, a dashboard of open data catalogs sourced from several open data portals.
ODS-Widgets is built using AngularJS and is open-sourced under the MIT license.
You can find the project home on GitHub with documentation and a tutorial to get started.
This project is still young and fresh, so we would be happy to get feedback, including new widget suggestions or the mention of areas in which documentation is lacking.
Feel free to fork the project and enhance it for your own needs, including plugging it on APIs that are not from Opendatasoft (feel free to send pull requests on GitHub if you do so).
