Developed in Georgia: Jumpstart Makes Sharing Your Data Easy
An information session and a demonstration of Xtraktr was held on April 13th at the IREX Multimedia Education Center.
According to the creators, Xtraktr is a tool developed in Georgia which makes survey data accessible, explorable, sharable, and usable, as data is meant to be in the 21st century.
According to the Executive Director at Jumpstart Georgia, Eric Barrett, Xtraktr makes it easy to share and visualize survey data in any language- and it is free.
“Xtraktr allows anyone to easily upload data files and to explore the data using visualizations that are shareable and embeddable. Extract your data into bar charts, pie charts, time-seried line graphs, maps and then share them easily using social media, export them into Raster and Vector formats for further design, or embed them into other online web pages using the built-in embed feature,” Barret said.
Xtraktr makes sharing your data easy.
“Xtraktr exposes your data so people can find it, explore it, use it, and ensure it has value long after your project has ended. Is your data in a language that makes it truly accessible to your audiences? If not, use Xtraktr to translate it into as many languages you need. It provides a useful framework, supported by an easy-to-use administration panel, to translate the questions, answers, and content of your dataset so anyone can use it,” Barret told the audience.
And, once translated, it can be downloaded into that language.
“We've tried to make the administration panel as easy to use as possible so far, though a lot of work remains to be done. Editing a dataset, questions, and answers is straightforward. You can edit one thing at a time, or make mass edits via exportable templates, as with the languages. Adding weights and making variables mappable is straight forward. Finally, for programmers, every dataset and its analysis results are accessible as raw, structured data via the application programming interface (API). This is most useful for panel data, as programmers can write programs or create their own interactive visualizations that update automatically when a new dataset is added to the WMS, for example,” he said.
According to Jason Addie, Operations Director at Jumpstart Georgia, at JumpStart Georgia, a lot of time is spent on searching for and analyzing data in order to create infographics, interactives, stories, and helpful tools.
“Luckily, a solution presented itself when UNICEF Georgia approached JumpStart with the desire to put their survey data online in a way that allowed anyone to easily analyze, visualize, share, and embed their survey data. We saw this as an opportunity to not only build a tool for UNICEF Georgia, but to build one that anyone with survey data could use,” Addie said.
According to Addie, the solution was Xtraktr, a FREE online tool that allows anyone with survey data to upload their data, easily analyze, and visualize the results.
“We used the Xtraktr framework to generate UNICEF Georgia's data portal site, which currently has 13 surveys and over 3,300 questions that can be analyzed by anyone with an internet connection,” he added.
Xtraktr is open-source software that anyone can use for free. However, one can also use, free of charge, JumpStart's existing online version at xtraktr.jumpstart.ge.
Tatia Megeneishvili