New Google tool - animated public data
Jinfo Blog

5th April 2010

By Penny Crossland

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So far, 2010 has already seen several ventures towards further democratization of the web. Earlier in the year, Michele Bate reported on the launch of data.gov.uk (http://www.vivavip.com/go/e27825) and Anne Jordan posted on the London Data Stores (http://www.vivavip.com/go/e27753), emulating the data stores in several US cities. Recently, Google Labs launched another venture making public data more accessible to web users: Google Public Data Explorer. (http://www.google.com/publicdata/home). Aimed primarily at journalists, students and researchers, The Public Data Explorer “makes large datasets easy to explore, visualize and communicate”, as the accompanying blog posts explains (http://digbig.com/5bbjkn). Any type of data can be compared in a variety of animated graphs, maps and charts. Google’s example chart provides population data for world regions, combined with life expectancy from 1960 to 2007. The animated bubble charts illuminate the data particularly well: colour-coded bubbles represent countries and contain population data. The bubbles vary in size according to their relation to the overall population. Users are able to embed charts into their own web pages, which can be updated automatically; very useful if you want to share the latest available data. Google claims that its motion feature does away with the need to use the X-axis in a chart to represent time. Its new product allows both X and Y coordinates to represent any two variables, with the change over time being shown through animation. According to Google, the animation feature triggers pattern recognitions in our minds, which does not happen when charts are motionless. There are currently 13 datasets available from international organizations such as the World Bank and the OECD, as well as US government departments, such as the Census Bureau, the Bureau of Labor Statistics and Bureau of Economic Analysis. Europe is represented by Eurostat. Google is hoping to sign up more data providers over time. This certainly looks to be a useful tool, and fun to play with, while we wait for more providers to supply their data.

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