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

I wonder how Wolfram|Alpha could take advantage of all this data made
available both by Google Fusion Tables and by the Linked Data project. Will
Alpha just try to slowly integrate it through its "curation pipeline"?
Wouldn't it be better to introduce something like "curation coefficients"
that would allow computation to be done by Alpha on imperfect data? This
would make it possible to quickly catch up on the published data, while
introducing some uncertainty in the results Alpha returns.
Cheers,
François

On Fri, Jul 3, 2009 at 2:28 PM, Chris Bizer <chris@bizer.de> 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
>
>
>