  Today, more and more open data statistics are published by governments,
statistical offices and organizations like the United Nations, The World Bank
or Eurostat. This data is freely available and can be consumed by end users in
interactive visualizations. However, additional information is needed to enable
laymen to interpret these statistics in order to make sense of the raw data. In
this paper, we present an approach to combine open data statistics with
historical events. In a user interface we have integrated interactive
visualizations of open data statistics with a timeline of thematically
appropriate historical events from Wikipedia. This can help users to explore
statistical data in several views and to get related events for certain trends
in the timeline. Events include links to Wikipedia articles, where details can
be found and the search process can be continued. We have conducted a user
study to evaluate if users can use the interface intuitively, if relations
between trends in statistics and historical events can be found and if users
like this approach for their exploration process.
