Google unleashes Fusion Tables

I just discovered Fusion Tables. There is life beyond the amazing Jeff’s Amazon Ec2/s3 after all!

Check out http://www.google.com/fusiontables/public/tour/index.html

Gather, visualize and share data online

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  • Visualize and publish your data as maps, timelines and charts
  • Host your data tables online
  • Combine data from multiple people

data table turns into map

Google Fusion Tables is a modern data management and publishing web application that makes it easy
to host, manage, collaborate on, visualize, and publish data tables online.

What can I do with Google Fusion Tables?

Import your own data
Upload data tables from spreadsheets or CSV files, even KML. Developers can use the Fusion Tables API to insert, update, delete and query data programmatically. You can export your data as CSV or KML too.

Visualize it instantly
See the data on a map or as a chart immediately. Use filters for more selective visualizations.

Publish your visualization on other web properties
Now that you’ve got that nice map or chart of your data, you can embed it in a web page or blog post. Or send a link by email or IM. It will always display the latest data values from your table and helps you communicate your story more easily.

Look at the Fusion Tables Example Gallery

at https://sites.google.com/site/fusiontablestalks/stories

If you are worried about data.gov closing down, heres a snapshot of Fusion Table Public datasets.


 

Parsing XML files easily

To parse a XML (or KML or PMML) file easily without using any complicated softwares, here is a piece of code that fits right in your excel sheet.

Just import this file using Excel, and then use the function getElement, after pasting the XML code in 1 cell.

It is used  for simply reading the xml/kml code as a text string. Just pasted all the xml code in one cell, and used the start ,end function (for example start=<constraints> and end=</constraints> to get the value of constraints in the xml code).

Simply read into the value in another cell using the getElement function.

heres the code if you ever need it.Just paste it into the VB editor of Excel to create the GetElement function (if not there already) or simply import the file in the link above.

Attribute VB_Name = “Module1”
Public Function getElement(xml As String, start As String, finish As String)
For i = 1 To Len(xml)
If Mid(xml, i, Len(start)) = start Then
For j = i + Len(start) To Len(xml)
If Mid(xml, j, Len(finish)) = finish Then
getElement = Mid(xml, i + Len(start), j – i – Len(start))
Exit Function
End If
Next j
End If
Next i
End Function

FOR Using the R Package for parsing XML …………………………reference this site –

http://www.omegahat.org/RSXML/Overview.html

or this thread from R -Help

> Lines <- ‘
+ <root>
+  <data loc=”1″>
+    <val i=”t1″> 22 </val>
+    <val i=”t2″> 45 </val>
+  </data>
+  <data loc=”2″>
+    <val i=”t1″> 44 </val>
+    <val i=”t2″> 11 </val>
+  </data>
+ </root>
+ ‘
>
> library(XML)
> doc <- xmlTreeParse(Lines, asText = TRUE, trim = TRUE, useInternalNodes = TRUE)
> root <- xmlRoot(doc)
>
> data1 <- getNodeSet(root, “//data”)[[1]]
> xmlValue(getNodeSet(data1, “//val”)[[1]])
[1] ” 22 “

SAS Analytics :Google Earth and Lex Jansen’s Site

Google earth stores values into KML files . These are almost like XMl file formats. The zipped versions of the KML file is the KMZ file .(It beats me why Google Wanted to create a zipped file format for KML ,since most KML files are extremely small).

To do any geo-coding analysis with Google Earth, here are two SAS papers from Lex Jansen’s terrific site.

1) 

Put Your Customers on the Map: Integrating SAS/GRAPH and Google Earth
(http://www2.sas.com/proceedings/forum2008/252-2008.pdf)

Daniel Kuiper, Koen Vyverman (SAS Global Forum, 2008-03)

 

and

2) Using SAS and Google Earth to Access and Display Air Pollution Data

(http://www2.sas.com/proceedings/forum2008/253-2008.pdf)
Joshua Drukenbrod, David Mintz (SAS Global Forum, 2008-03)

 

These two papers are great in the way they use Google Earth for geo coding analysis and visual representation. They however require SAS to be licensed with you.

Lex Jansen ‘s site is generally considered the de facto site to search for analytics especially related to SAS.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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