Google Public Data - Maps Anyone?
Because Google announces most of its news via blogs, sometimes I for one miss announcements that deserve a look from a geographic perspective. Case in point: Tuesday’s announcement of Google Public Data via blog, covered here by the Washington Post.
Per the Post it’s “a new search tool yesterday designed to help Web users find public data that is often buried in hard-to-navigate government Web sites.” (See video below) The bottom line though, is that the tool can’t find data that is not already “visible” to Google, as NextGov points out. And, there’s the rub - a lot of public (and private data) is not searchable since it’s “hidden” in databases that Google and other search engines can’t see and therefore index. That part of the Web is sometimes called the “Deep Web.” (I know for example that I must physically visit some magazine website to search their articles since they are not indexed by Google.)
The effort will begin by offering U.S. population and unemployment data from the Census Bureau and the Bureau of Labor Statistics followed by emissions statistics from the Environmental Protection Agency.
Ok, so what about public map data? Google has KML search and ESRI has touted how data served by ArGIS Server will be findable. Could that be an addition for the future? Could that be the next solution past Geospatial One-Stop?
