San Francisco — Striving to keep its information treasure trove up to the hilt, Google on Wednesday opened up its Public Data Explorer to the general public, who want to use their own data to create powerful, interactive visualizations of their information, meaning you can use it to upload your own datasets and manipulate it for comparison or presentation purposes.
Now, rather than just circling around the data that Google has uploaded, like unemployment figures and population statistics, you can add stats of your own. The Public Data Explorer currently allows you to compare datasets from around the world uploaded by partners such as the U.S. Census Bureau or the World Bank.
However, as more and more data sets are uploaded for public consumption, you may find Google’s Public Data Explorer to be a useful reference for presentations, reports and simply to satisfy your curiosity. Because data is linked to its source, the charts are continuously updated when new data is available.
Data is often only as good as the tools used to help people understand what it means. (Credit: Google)
Unfortunately, the tool, which exists in Google Labs, requires users to have a mastery of the document programming language XML, a knowledge of which most Google users are unlikely to possess.
“We are making a new data format, the DataSet Publishing Language (DSPL), openly available, and providing an interface for anyone to upload their datasets, so they can benefit from the same powerful, animated visualizations that we provide with our existing datasets, and then share them with other people to explore and understand,” the company explains.
“Since the past two years, we have made public data easier to find, explore and understand in several ways, providing unemployment figures, population statistics and world development indicators in search results, and introducing the Public Data Explorer tool,” says Omar Benjelloun, Technical Lead of the Google Public Data Team. “Together with our data provider partners, we have curated 27 datasets including more than 300 data metrics. You can now use the Public Data Explorer to visualize everything from labor productivity (OECD) to Internet speed (Ookla) to gender balance in parliaments (UNECE) to government debt levels (IMF) to population density by municipality (Statistics Catalonia), with more data being added every week.”
Further, each chart can be analyzed — just click on the “explore data” link in the lower right-hand corner of a chart you are interested in. A large window opens up that allows you to slice and dice the data in different ways.
For example, in Google’s Public Dataset “Life Expectancy at Birth,” data is sorted by geographical region, but by clicking on a specific country in a listing to the left of the chart, you can see one or more countries at a time. Also, rolling over the key will cause regions to “flash” and become far more visible. Animations are built into most data sets.
Here is how to add your own… According to Google, adding your data is a three-step process:
- Describe your dataset using DSPL (an open, XML-based metadata format optimized for data visualization). See the documentation on Google Code for more information.
- Bundle your data and metadata into a single compressed file, and upload it.
- Preview, share, and publish your dataset for others to see and use.
It is still a Google Labs project, which means bugs are to be expected, but those interested can start tinkering around with the tool from the “My Datasets” link off the Public Data Explorer page linked above.