Google: Find and Compare Public Data
Google adds search power to public data, making find and compare more easy; http://tr.im/jZBJ
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Gerrit Eicker
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eicker. Wir sprechen Online. Folgen Sie uns zu relevanten Nachrichten rund ums Web. [RSS, Kontakt]
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Gerrit Eicker 08:50 on 29. April 2009 Permalink |
Google: “The data we’re including in this first launch represents just a small fraction of all the interesting public data available on the web. There are statistics for prices of cookies, CO2 emissions, asthma frequency, high school graduation rates, bakers’ salaries, number of wildfires, and the list goes on. Reliable information about these kinds of things exists thanks to the hard work of data collectors gathering countless survey forms, and of careful statisticians estimating meaningful indicators that make hidden patterns of the world visible to the eye. All the data we’ve used in this first launch are produced and published by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics and the U.S. Census Bureau’s Population Division. They did the hard work! We just made the data a bit easier to find and use.”
RWW: “The company is starting with population and unemployment data from around the US but promises to make far more data sets searchable in the future. The potential significance of making aggregate data about our world easy to visualize, cross reference and compare can’t be overstated.”
VB: “I’m hoping Google improves the user interface, too. Right now, you have to be careful in your searches. My query about ‘unemployment San Francisco’ left me baffled and frustrated, until I remembered to add the word ‘rate.’ There’s also no good way to jump between different categories once you’re looking at the data, for example no button that lets you move directly from the unemployment data to the population numbers. Lastly, I’m frustrated that there’s no obvious way to adjust the scale of the timeline. What if I’m more interested in unemployment trends in the past few years, rather than the last decade and a half?”
SEL: “Why did Google announce this during the Wolfram Alpha Demo? Wolfram Alpha seems to be all about collecting these data sources and making it easy for people to search information on these types of data sources, complete with charts. The timing suggest Google was hoping to spoil what some see as a weakness it might have compared to Wolfram Alpha.”
Open Data Study « Wir sprechen Online. 11:32 on 17. December 2010 Permalink |
[...] Socrata [PDF]: The state of open data from 3 perspectives, the public, government and developers; http://eicker.at/OpenDataStudy [...]