Today I'm excited to announce that Google Fusion Tables is releasing its own API.
What is Fusion Tables? A product launched recently in Google Labs, Fusion Tables is a free service for sharing and visualizing data online. It allows you to upload data, share and mark up your data with collaborators, merge data from multiple tables, and create visualizations like charts and maps.
Do you have data you need to share with other organizations? In Fusion Tables, you can share all or part of a table with other people. Does your data mean more when seen together with other datasets you don't own? By merging your data with other people's shared tables, you can see the whole picture in one place, discuss the data in embedded comments, and mark up the data with your collaborators. Fusion Tables keeps track of who contributed each part of the data and who has permission to edit.
Watch Circle of Blue's video description of how they use Fusion Tables to combine and visualize water data.
Often the real meaning and potential impact of a database can be hidden behind all the raw names and numbers, but a well-chosen visualization can bring the data to life. Fusion Tables has automatic data visualization built in: we've integrated with the Google Maps API and the Google Visualization API so you can view your data in maps, motion charts, and graphs. All of these can be embedded in your webpage, your Google Site, your blog...any Web page you want! The visualizations even update automatically as data is updated or corrected. Embed the visualization once, and the latest version will always be shown automatically.
Let other people help spot outliers and unexpected values in your dataset by linking them directly to data that is filtered, aggregated, and visualized for various angles of examination. Fusion Tables' data discussion features help you gather feedback from your community.
Is your dataset active, always changing? Is it being collected right now on cell phones or websites? With the new Fusion Tables API, you can update and query your dataset in Fusion Tables programmatically, without ever logging in to the Fusion Tables website. The API means you can import data from whatever data source you may have, whether a text file or a full-powered data base. On the more exotic side, imagine you're collecting data via survey software on GPS-enabled cell phones, as the Open Data Kit project is doing. Open Data Kit uses Google App Engine and the Fusion Tables API to instantly map locations of survey results.
Are you a data exhibitionist? Put your data in Fusion Tables and make it available for the world to see! Fusion Tables will maintain your attribution as your data participates in other tables, enforce your choices about sharing and exporting the data, and invite Google Web Search to index the table.
Fusion Tables allows datasets to play together in a safe, collaborative, and privacy-controlled environment. We can't wait to hear about the amazing things you will make happen with Fusion Tables.
By Anno Langen, Jayant Madhavan and Rebecca Shapley, Google Fusion Tables Team
