A product launched recently in Google Labs, Fusion Tables is a free service for sharing and visualizing data online. It allows you to upload data, share and mark up your data with collaborators, merge data from multiple tables, and create visualizations like charts and maps.”
“A well-chosen visualization can bring the data to life. Fusion Tables has automatic data visualization built in:” Google has integrated it with the Google Maps API and the Google Visualization API so you can view your data in maps, motion charts, and graphs. “All of these can be embedded in your webpage, your Google Site, your blog…any Web page you want! The visualizations even update automatically as data is updated or corrected. Embed the visualization once, and the latest version will always be shown automatically.”
As the Google Announcement says, “Let other people help spot outliers and unexpected values in your dataset by linking them directly to data that is filtered, aggregated, and visualized for various angles of examination. Fusion Tables’ data discussion features help you gather feedback from your community.
Is your dataset active, always changing? Is it being collected right now on cell phones or websites? With the new Fusion Tables API, you can update and query your dataset in Fusion Tables programmatically, without ever logging in to the Fusion Tables website. The API means you can import data from whatever data source you may have, whether a text file or a full-powered data base. On the more exotic side, imagine you’re collecting data via survey software on GPS-enabled cell phones, as the Open Data Kit project is doing. Open Data Kit uses Google App Engine and the Fusion Tables API to instantly map locations of survey results.”
ReadWriteWeb has a long and detailed post on Google Fusion Tables here. It’s well worth a read.
Filed under: Uncategorized Tagged: | Data Collaboration, Data Visualization, Fusion Tables, Google API, Google Fusion Tables, Google Maps, Mashups
