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

“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@...