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

 

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>
http://alonhalevy.blogspot.com/2009/06/fusion-tables-third-piece-of-puzzle.h
tml

 

“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>
http://googleresearch.blogspot.com/2009/06/google-fusion-tables.html

Water data example
<http://www.circleofblue.org/waternews/2009/world/google-brings-water-data-t
o-life/>
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> http://www.bizer.de

 <mailto:chris@bizer.de> chris@bizer.de