This past week, Google opened its public data explorer tool up to any data in the Dataset Publishing Language. For quickly and effectively analyzing large sets of data, this is a huge win. As is often the case, it’s sometimes relatively simple to collect large sets of information – server statistics, varios web related stats, advertising and visitor data, etc. Having huge amounts of data is great, but doesn’t really matter that much if you can’t do anything with it. Google Data Explorer is a powerful, but until now it was limited to a certain amount of Google-Curated datasets. Now, Google Data explore is open to analyze any set of data, providing another publicly accessible tool for analyzing data. Hopefully, we’ll start to see some good applications of this. Also, I think it may be possible that some of the data visualization tools user here might start to find their way into the update of Google Analyitics. I’ve gotten to play around with the new Google Analytics beta interface, and I think the visualization tools could fit nicely into the new Analytics Interface.

Excerpt from the announcement:

“Today, we’re opening the Public Data Explorer to your data. We’re making a new data format, the Dataset Publishing Language (DSPL), openly available, and providing an interface foranyone to upload their datasets. DSPL is an XML-based format designed from the ground up to support rich, interactive visualizations like those in the Public Data Explorer. The DSPL language and upload interface are available in Google Labs.

Google’s Announcement
Public Data Explorer site
Thanks to the Morpheus Media SEO team for passing this around!