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Re: Fusion Tables: Google's approach to sharing data on the Web
by François Dongier
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Kingsley,
Looks like you're imagining a scenario in which Wolfram Alpha, after having done its mathematical computation relevant to a particular user query, would expose its result in a format that would enrich the web of data. I agree that this would indeed be pretty nice but I wasn't asking for so much: I was more thinking of Alpha as an application at the end of the data processing pipeline (for instance, for data visualisation), not so much as an application that produces reusable output.
In fact I have two basic questions about Wolfram|Alpha:
1. How can Alpha take advantage of the (not always "curated") data available on the web? This is the question I was asking, and it's not about data format but about data correctness: Wolfram insists that they must "curate" data to make sure it's reliable. I am worried that they won't be able to catch up, given the explosion of data that will soon be produced by projects such as Linked Data and Google Fusion Tables.
2. Will Wolfram want to expose its curated data (ideally in RDF), enabling other applications (say, Sparql queries) to merge it with other data? Here my question really is: will they want to share this data, or will they prefer to keep it private? If they want to share it, then I agree that Linked Data format would be best .
Regards,
François
2009/7/3 Kingsley Idehen <kidehen@...>
François Dongier wrote:Francois,
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.
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<http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/%7Efranklin/Papers/dataspaceSR.pdf>
On Fri, Jul 3, 2009 at 2:28 PM, Chris Bizer <chris@... <mailto:chris@...>> 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.pdfchris@... <mailto:chris@...>
--
Prof. Dr. Christian Bizer
Web-based Systems Group
Freie Universität Berlin
+49 30 838 55509
http://www.bizer.de
--
Regards,
Kingsley Idehen Weblog: http://www.openlinksw.com/blog/~kidehen
President & CEO OpenLink Software Web: http://www.openlinksw.com
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