I was recently thinking of submitting a project for the Medialab-Prado Visualizar workshop. It is a workshop that aims to facilitate the gathering of data and foster understanding from the collected data.
The problem I see is that because the data is generally so individual it requires a unique presentation technique and any general presentation tool dose not for fill the needs of the data supplier, so there is know incentive to supply the data.
What I think is needed is some sort of data comparison tool, so the data can be shared and compared with other data. The incentive being that your data would be compared to a huge amount of other data in a search for correlations. The data could be compared over time, geographically, against similar data etc. In return you would have to upload your data on to a public site so othere people could compare there data against yours.