Re: Fusion Tables: Google's approach to sharing data on the Web

Chris Bizer wrote:
>
> Hi all,
>
> I’m regularly following Alon Halevy blog as I really like his thoughts 
> on dataspaces [1].
>
> Today, I discovered this post about Google Fusion Tables
>
> http://alonhalevy.blogspot.com/2009/06/fusion-tables-third-piece-of-puzzle.html
>
> “The main goal of Fusion Tables is to make it easier for people to 
> create, manage and share on structured data on the Web. Fusion Tables 
> is a new kind of data management system that focuses on features that 
> /enable collaboration/. […] In a nutshell, Fusion Tables enables you 
> to upload tabular data (up to 100MB per table) from spreadsheets and 
> CSV files. You can filter and aggregate the data and visualize it in 
> several ways, such as maps and time lines. The system will try to 
> recognize columns that represent geographical locations and suggest 
> appropriate visualizations. To collaborate, you can share a table with 
> a select set of collaborators or make it public. One of the reasons to 
> collaborate is to enable /fusing/ data from multiple tables, which is 
> a simple yet powerful form of data integration. If you have a table 
> about water resources in the countries of the world, and I have data 
> about the incidence of malaria in various countries, we can fuse our 
> data on the country column, and see our data side by side.”
>
> See also
>
> Google announcement 
> http://googleresearch.blogspot.com/2009/06/google-fusion-tables.html
>
> Water data example 
> http://www.circleofblue.org/waternews/2009/world/google-brings-water-data-to-life/
>
> Taken this together with Google Squared and the recent announcement 
> that Google is going to crawl microformats and RDFa,
>
> it starts to look like the folks at Google are working in the same 
> direction as the Linking Open Data community, but as usual a bit more 
> centralized and less webish.
>
> Cheers,
>
> Chris
>
> [1] http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~franklin/Papers/dataspaceSR.pdf
>
> --
>
> Prof. Dr. Christian Bizer
>
> Web-based Systems Group
>
> Freie Universität Berlin
>
> +49 30 838 55509
>
> http://www.bizer.de
>
> chris@bizer.de <mailto:chris@bizer.de>
>
Chris,

A few questions:

1. What's the difference between a Dataspace and a Data Space?
2. What's the difference between either of the above and a Virtual 
Database (plaform for: Data Virtualization)?


I ask these questions because in your view it's crystal clear to me that 
there must be differences, so please fill in the blanks for me as I 
profoundly believe the quest for knowledge always starts at: knowing 
what you don't know. Right now, there is clearly something I don't know 
about Data Spaces, Dataspaces, and Virtual Databases.



-- 


Regards,

Kingsley Idehen	      Weblog: http://www.openlinksw.com/blog/~kidehen
President & CEO 
OpenLink Software     Web: http://www.openlinksw.com

Received on Friday, 3 July 2009 13:54:16 UTC