a service for managing large collections of tabular data in the cloud…You can apply filters and aggregation to your data, visualize it on maps and other charts, merge data from multiple tables, and export it to the Web or csv files.
I wanted to take it for a spin, so I got some data from the Public Crime application we built for the Philadelphia Police Department and loaded it into a Google spreadsheet. You can import local files (.XLS, .XLSX, .CSV & .ODS) as well as import directly from Google Spreadsheets to the tables. One thing to note is that once the file or spreadsheet is imported into a Fusion Table, there is no bulk import functionality to update from outside files. The Fusion Table expects to become the application that manages the data.
After the import there is the interface to create metadata that stays with the dataset for its life span.
Once the data is in the table, there are a number of ways if interpreting the data. There are filtering capabilities that allow you to build ad-hoc queries against the table and perform aggregations to generate reports on the data.
The functionality that most excited me about Fusion Tables was the visualization capabilities. Leveraging the filtering and aggregation, the charts can tell a pretty compelling story. Another note, the embeddable code seemed a little buggy, the aggregations did not get carried over to the script tag.
By choosing the ‘Map’ option from the ‘Visualize’ menu brought up a Google Map with all of the points that could be geocoded on the map.
I guess for performance reasons, Google is limiting the number of points on the map to 200. Maybe that number will be increased when it is released out of Labs, we’ll have to see.
There is a lot of functionality that I haven’t touched on, maybe in a future post. I have made the Fusion Table publicly accessible (but not editable), so feel free to go and play around with it.
Final Note: I did have to do some editing to the source data and it does not reflect the information that is directly downloaded from the PPD Public Crime site. Those edits included:
- Removing the word ‘BLOCK’ from the address field
- Appending the address with ‘,Philadelphia, PA’ to facilitate geocoding
- Removing the columns that stores the local coordinates
