using r to get value out of public data

Public sector information contains great value for the citizens in general. Data stored on computers of public institutions doesn’t have value on its own. It has to be processed and analyzed to obtain information, and further on, information should be made available as public good, in order to facilitate its transformation to knowledge. R is a free software programming language, an environment and toolkit of modules addressed to anyone working with statistics. R can ease the road from public data to civic wisdom. This article is a brief review of R capabilities to extract, transform, analyze, and visualize public data. Second part of the article presents an example of a fully-fledged web application written entirely in R. The application uses loosely structured government data about Romanian Auto Park in order to present it in a friendly dashboard.