OpenData Explorer GPT: Unlocking Information through AI

Introducing the OpenData Explorer GPT

The past few days after the announcementfrom OpenAI that users will be able to create custom versions of ChatGPT or GPTs, I decided to do an experiment creating one myself.

Something that has always been bugging me is the difficulty of finding information of high quality when searching most topics on the web regarding Greece or, frankly, any search using the Greek language, especially compared to English search results. The aforementioned, combined with the generally always tricky task of getting information from trustworthy sources, led to the creation of the**OpenData Explorer GPT**.

This GPT is mainly powered by the Open Data published by the Greek central government, local authorities, and public bodies athttps://data.gov.gr.

OpenData Explorer GPT

The big advantage that an LLM chatbot like this GPT can provide is natural language understanding and how that can simplify the process of people searching for information.
Journalists, students, or anyone else can access (and soon properly visualize) data regarding education, the environment, health, transport, crime, etc.

By making open data more accessible, we can increase their impact on society. A few examples:
•Increase transparency and accountability: Users can check the trend of how many people take public transport and compare it to the available fleet; they can monitor the quality of broadband internet

•Raise awareness on environmental issues: Users can check the number of fires, the electricity consumption, and the renewable energy sources used all over the country
•Social impact: Users can observe unemployment trends, crime rates, drunk driving accidents

OpenData Explorer currently supports only data that derive fromhttps://data.gov.gr, but if positive results come out of this attempt, the goal would be to integrate it with open data from other countries as well. This would enable intriguing combinational prompts and provide access to a much greater audience.

It's still worth mentioning, like any other piece of technology, but even more so with such a new one, it is still very crucial to check the validity of any AI-generated response.

If you've read this far, the fun visual part comes now. Below, I will share some of the example prompts you can give the OpenData Explorer GPT and compare it to plain ChatGPT. I would love people to try it and test out its potential and, of course, receive feedback about it.

Let me know what you think!

As a disclaimer for this GPT:

• for a lot of dates, there is no data
• GPT is limited to the available datasets from data.gov.gr
• it's not good yet at doing basic operations with the results (e.g., adding them) if you don't guide it properly
• graph creation is not the best, either
• some of the responses are too big for it to handle

Open Data

If you are interested in Open Data, below are a few observations and interesting points that I discovered during my investigation of Open Data in Greece.

According to https://data.europa.eu

Open (Government) Data refers to the information collected, produced or paid for by the public bodies (also referred to as Public Sector Information) and made freely available for re-use for any purpose.

It is worth mentioning that the quality of this data is very important, and a key part of that is providing a machine-readable friendly format (e.g., via API technologies).

For https://data.gov.gr:

• the API access option to the data is very useful
• documentation and instructions on how to use the API are lacking
• there are only 52 datasets available
• a lot of the datasets are not updated (e.g., data for forest wildfires stops on 2018-12-31 or electricity consumption data is provided only for a few days of 2020)
• on the site, you can find the number of people who have used the API, and I was surprised to see that OpenData Explorer was, in a lot of cases, the first to make requests to it

Greek Open Data:

• there is more available open data from Greek organizations, but it's not in data.gov.gr, and in a lot of cases, it is in non-friendly formats (such as PDFs)
• Greece ranked 28th (out of 35) in Open Data Maturity in 2022, according tohttps://data.europa.eu/en/publications/open-data-maturity/2022#country-overview
• according to the "Greece 2.0" plan, a total budget of 5.227.840,00 euros will be invested, having started from 2023 and until 2025, to the project of "Open data and enhancing participation" seehttps://greece20.gov.gr/wp-content/uploads/654.SUB5_ANOIKTA_DEDOMENA_EDYTE_5190853.pdf

If you want to learn more about the state of open data in Greece, I highly recommend reading*The slow death of open data in Greece*, an article by Eliza Triantafyllou.

I'm also following the initiatives ofΕΕΛ/ΛΑΚ GFOSS, which contributes to the development of Open Technologies in Greece.