Chris Bizer wrote:
Hi all,
I’m regularly following Alon Halevy blog as I really like his thoughts
on dataspaces [1].
Today, I discovered this post about Google Fusion Tables
http://alonhalevy.blogspot.com/2009/06/fusion-tables-third-piece-of-puzzle.html
“The main goal of Fusion Tables is to make it easier for people to
create, manage and share on structured data on the Web. Fusion Tables
is a new kind of data management system that focuses on features that
/enable collaboration/. […] In a nutshell, Fusion Tables enables you
to upload tabular data (up to 100MB per table) from spreadsheets and
CSV files. You can filter and aggregate the data and visualize it in
several ways, such as maps and time lines. The system will try to
recognize columns that represent geographical locations and suggest
appropriate visualizations. To collaborate, you can share a table with
a select set of collaborators or make it public. One of the reasons to
collaborate is to enable /fusing/ data from multiple tables, which is
a simple yet powerful form of data integration. If you have a table
about water resources in the countries of the world, and I have data
about the incidence of malaria in various countries, we can fuse our
data on the country column, and see our data side by side.”
See also
Google announcement
http://googleresearch.blogspot.com/2009/06/google-fusion-tables.html
Water data example
http://www.circleofblue.org/waternews/2009/world/google-brings-water-data-to-life/
Taken this together with Google Squared and the recent announcement
that Google is going to crawl microformats and RDFa,
it starts to look like the folks at Google are working in the same
direction as the Linking Open Data community, but as usual a bit more
centralized and less webish.
Cheers,
Chris
[1] http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~franklin/Papers/dataspaceSR.pdf
--
Prof. Dr. Christian Bizer
Web-based Systems Group
Freie Universität Berlin
+49 30 838 55509
http://www.bizer.de
[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>
Chris,
A few questions:
1. What's the difference between a Dataspace and a Data Space?
2. What's the difference between either of the above and a Virtual
Database (plaform for: Data Virtualization)?
I ask these questions because in your view it's crystal clear to me that
there must be differences, so please fill in the blanks for me as I
profoundly believe the quest for knowledge always starts at: knowing
what you don't know. Right now, there is clearly something I don't know
about Data Spaces, Dataspaces, and Virtual Databases.
--
Regards,
Kingsley Idehen Weblog: http://www.openlinksw.com/blog/~kidehen
President & CEO
OpenLink Software Web: http://www.openlinksw.com
