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

François Dongier wrote:
> 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.
Francois,

Since the overall theme is Linked Data (HTTP URIs for data objects), how 
does WolframAlpha add any value if the end result is an opaque HTML 
resource (one that lacks structure data granularity or pointers to 
structured data sources)?

Value comes if Google exposes its Dataspace GUIDs as HTTP URIs, and then 
WolframAlpha (or anyone else in the data processing pipeline) does the 
same, then you get something that is truly valuable i.e.:

1. Computation Answer Engine that emits its Linked Data (as per Linked 
Data meme)
2. Google's contribution to the Linked Data Web realm via Data Spaces / 
Virtual Database technology that also emits Linked Data.

The ultimate value of the Web remains the fundamental separation of the 
following re. data:

1. Identity
2. Storage
3. Access
4. Representation
5. Presentation.

We cannot see, comprehend, and appreciate the Web via item #5 solely, 
which is always the case when the output representation from a Web 
service lacks pointers (HTTP URIs)  to  RDF model based structured and 
interlinked data  in line with Linked Data meme.

To conclude, things will more than likely get better now that  Google, 
Yahoo!, and Microsoft (naturally) are beginning to see alignment between 
their respective customer-driven technology adoption strategies and the 
virtues of Linked Data, thanks to RDFa and the GoodRelations vocabulary.


Kingsley 
>
> Cheers,
> François
>
> On Fri, Jul 3, 2009 at 2:28 PM, Chris Bizer <chris@bizer.de 
> <mailto: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
>     <http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/%7Efranklin/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>
>
>      
>
>


-- 


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 16:25:46 UTC