Abstract
This paper aims to shed light on an emerging class of phenomena that are related to the abundance of data, which either come from personal life records or from open data portals, and to the strategies to tame this abundance to enable the human making of sense and decision. In particular, a new category can be introduced for these kind of data, which are neither primary (that is being deeply engrained into a work practice), nor secondary (i.e., processed by and for specialists, like the members of clerical, managerial or research staff) but, in a way, "tertiary", as they are consumed (when not directly produced) by "final customers". Hence, new ways of engaging users to either enable or facilitate the direct comprehension, and the ad-hoc manipulation and tailoring of data to unpredictable and unstructured tasks should be devised, also by means of more active and inter-active visualization techniques, in order to reduce the information overload and to let users shape their data landscapes in a virtuos cycle that may also return benefit to the same (primary) production and uses of data. In so doing, both data can partake in the end-users lives and these latter partake in improving the quality of data in face of the current (open) big data tide.