Google just launched a pre-alpha “Fusion Tables”. The visualization capability is okay, the interface is not fully stable, but the cool thing is the ability to merge two tables, something I’ve spent a lot of time doing manually in the past, or with ad-hoc scripts.
Here’s an example where I merge their GDP table with a disease table. I need to pick the “WHO Regions/Country” in the right column, so that both tables get aligned:
Afterwards, I can do a scatter plot of GDP rank (X) with child mortality/1000 (Y):
So, high GDP makes child mortality less likely, but not always, and it’s not a correlation.
Even if Fusion tables is pre-alpha, the table fusion capability makes it immediately useful. The collaboration features look cool, but it will take some time to get them to work right. Then we’ll have proper horizontal collaboration.
Thanks for the link – I'm looking forward to trying out my own data on google fusion – that is a pretty great thing to be able to do!
Have you played with the data at gapminder yet?
http://www.gapminder.org/
For the data sets that they have, it is an absolutely fantastic visualisation tool. It will be nice when we can embed the results places, but it's still pretty useful.
What does a plot of child mortality versus GDP per capita look like? Taking the log of child mortality might also reveal more of interest.
Tim, thanks for the link – Gapminder is actually owned by Google.
Radford, I wasn't able to do transforms on variables in Fusion – one would have to export, transform and reimport the data.
It is good to see that Google is finally entering the Data Visualization and Infographics space with Google Fusion. Data visualization is currently not available in the Google Apps platform. There are some 3rd party Google Docs gadgets for creating TreeMaps, Timelines, Pivot Tables, Maps and such, but nothing that is officially supported by Google.
There are many players in the consumer data visualization space – IBM Many Eyes, Chartle, Timetric, dabbledb, Microsoft Research Excel add-ins and others, but IBM Many Eyes is the best thus far. You can create amazing visualization with Many Eyes.
In time, I am sure Google will be a strong contender in this technology space, but they have a long way to go.