Nortear: A platform to support higher education applicants' decisions

Abstract

Project Work presented as the partial requirement for obtaining a Master's degree in Information Management, specialization in Knowledge Management and Business Intelligence ; Data can have immense public value, and although Open Data has been made available on the internet mostly by governments and public institutions having as a main justification the "public interest", most of what is turned public, is done so in formats not suitable to the eyes of most of the public which they are aimed to. The high level of digital literacy needed to turn this data into useful information continues to keep virtually inaccessible what was supposed to be Open Data. This work aims exclusively on data over the education sector, but this situation is also true for data involving other sectors of organized society. This Open Data which is virtually "locked data" have grave relevance to students, parents, and society. This work aims to give a humble step towards exploring the lack of accessibility for information extracted from Open Data on the Portuguese educational sector to collect data that are relevant to future graduates on the choice for a university aiming to create a platform where these students can access visualizations linked to key decision factors relevant when choosing a place to study, including information about the city, the country, and the university. This way, this work intends also to create encouragement to more initiatives which can help to "translate" data for the good of the broad public.