If you haven’t realized this by now, Google is great at capturing and displaying data. Data is found all over the place and Google wants to help share information to the public. Now we’re not talking about Wikileaks kind of data, but rather public data, data that is available for anyone to view and use. Google has partnered up with 27 of the world’s largest datasets to form the Google Public Data Explorer, a collaboration of public data that is easily explored and visualized. Datasets include Internet speeds, population density, government debt and many others from organizations like Ookla, Statistics Catalonia and IMF respectively. You can check out the full dataset directory for yourself.
Google Public Data Explorer allows you to view the data in either a line, bar, map or bubble chart format and also allows you to compare multiple sets of data, depending on what’s included in the dataset.
Google is also allowing everyone to upload their own datasets to be used publicly. The datasets can be uploaded in the new Dataset Publishing Language (DSPL), which uses the XML based format. Everyone that uploads their data will allow their data to be shared to anyone who wants to view it, but won’t appear in the Public Data Explorer unless you’re a reliable source of data and follow the process to get it verified.
You could spend countless hours on the Public Data Explorer and learn a lot of information. One interesting statistic that I found is the Worldwide Broadband Performance download speed is 8,630.13 kbps and upload of 2,415.54 kbps.
