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Mashable, by Jennifer Van Grove, March 8.
New Google Tool Visualizes Public Data in Animated Charts
Google has just launched
Google Public Data Explorer (explained in this blog entry). The new Google Labs tool offers a visual way to look at and analyze large public data sets on a variety of popular search topics.
The tool is specifically designed for avid data crunchers like students, journalists, policy makers, and could be seen as Google's prettified approach to a user-driven computational search engine (think Wolfram Alpha). Public Data Explorer is its own dedicated utility that expands and improves upon existing functionality added to the search experience last year.
Interested parties can visually dissect - in time-lapsed animation fashion and in an array of chart types - things like fertility rate by country, employment rates, and the flux of mortality rates in the U.S. Data is provided by the World Bank, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the U.S. Census Bureau, the California Department of Education and four other public agencies. The visual animation technology comes from Trendalyzer, a service that Google purchased back in 2007.
Editor:
Similar tools for public data visualization were recently released by
Tableau:
Tableau Launches Free Software To Make Data Social
and Swivel: Swivel Public