When budgets are discussed, the focus is often on adaptations and changes to in the budget, in many cases as reflections of indications of changes in political priorities. Time-series analysis bring such changes in budget and spending data to light.

Open Knowledge Greece, a chapter of the Open Knowledge Network based in Thessaloniki and partner in OpenBudets.eu has now developed an algorithm that does exactly that: time series analysis of budget data.

An algorithm is a self-contained step-by-step set of operations that helps to process and analyse data. The times series algorithm is only the first to be developed as part the application Indigo. Users of Indigo can apply different data processing functions to fiscal data sets to gain deeper insights.

In the application, you can choose and define the criteria relevant to answer your question in regard to the fiscal dataset of choice. Indigo will then help you analyze the dataset with show you a variety of visualisations. Have a look at the screencast below to see how it works!

Indigo is designed to work with OpenSpending out of the box, so that you can use it to analyze datasets in the public Open Spending repository or your own datasets, uploaded through the Open Spending packager. During the next months more algorithms will be developed and included into Indigo along with the ability to create and reuse custom fiscal indicators by combining aggregated data from various sources.

You are invited to test the tool and its first set of functions. You are welcome to leave feedback.