Yet another creature has crawled out of the muck that is the mad scientist home of Google Labs (news, site). This one’s intent on helping you visualize and explore publicly-available data.
Why the Public Data Explorer?
Following on the heels of efforts in the US and UK to get public data online and mined in an infinite variation of ways, Google Labs has now launched the Public Data Explorer. According to Google, this project “makes large datasets easy to explore, visualize and communicate.”
As far as brand new ideas and technologies go, this one’s a bit of an also-ran (and is built on tech that Google acquired in 2007). Everyone and their brother is going after the issue of making sense out of massive public datasets right now. Why now? Because we finally have two critical pieces of the puzzle:
- The raw computing power to handle extremely large public datasets
- The in-development protocols for the semantic web, which make it possible to break these datasets down into context that computers can make sense of
So No Big Deal?
Well, don’t be so fast to judge. The issue of visualizing and exploring large public datasets is a young field with plenty of room for advancements. A lot of the charts today’s tools generate are complex and incomprehensible to the average person, though they’re exciting as far as the bleeding edge of technology.
There’s plenty of room to innovate in this space, and in ways no one has thought of yet. So an organization with the size and collective mind-power of Google has a shot at making leaps that could amaze us all. Or not. It’s all in the implementation.
