Visualize your own data in the Google Public Data Explorer

Over the past two years, we’ve made public data easier to find, explore and understand in several ways, providing unemployment figures, population statistics and world development indicators in search results, and introducing the Public Data Explorer tool. Together with our data provider partners, we’ve curated 27 datasets including more than 300 data metrics. You can now use the Public Data Explorer to visualize everything from labor productivity (OECD) to Internet speed (Ookla) to gender balance in parliaments (UNECE) to government debt levels (IMF) to population density by municipality (Statistics Catalonia), with more data being added every week.

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 for anyone 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.

To upload a dataset, click on the “My Datasets” link on the left-hand side of the Public Data Explorer. Once imported, a dataset can be visualized, embedded in external websites, shared with others and published. If you’re an official provider, you can request that your datasets appear in the Public Data Explorer directory; please contact us to discuss this process.

With this new capability, we hope more datasets can come to life through Public Data Explorer visualisations and enable people to better understand the world around them and make more informed, data-driven decisions. Stay tuned for more datasets, visualization features and DSPL extensions in the future.

Google Summer of Code Announced at LCA


Despite the recent devastating floods in Australia, the open source community is converging on Brisbane this week for the annual linux.conf.au (LCA). The LCA team “encourages everyone to still come to Brisbane and support local business and the community – we need your support.” Monday during the introductory session at LCA, Carol Smith, member of the Google Open Source Programs Office, proudly announced Google Summer of Code 2011.

This will be the 7th year for Google Summer of Code, an innovative program dedicated to introducing students from colleges and universities around the world to open source software development. The program offers student developers stipends to write code for various open source projects with the help of mentoring organizations from all around the globe. Over the past 6 years Google Summer of Code has had 4,500 students from over 85 countries complete the program. We are excited to announce that we will extend the scope of the program this year by targeting a 25% increase in accepted student applications as well as accepting a larger number of mentoring organizations. Our goal is to help these students pursue academic challenges over the summer break while they create and release open source code for the benefit of all.
Spread the word to your friends! If you know of a university student that would be interested in working on open source projects this summer, or if you know of an organization that might want to mentor students to work on their open source projects, please direct them to our Google Summer of Code 2011 website where they can find our timeline along with the FAQs. And stay tuned for more details coming soon!