Google's Fusion Tables Make Mapping & Data Sharing Easy

With project collaborators all over California and one in Chicago, we’ve made extensive use of Google Docs here at Nonprofitmapping.org. They make data sharing and real time collaboration much easier than email chains and constant FTP’ing — and they’re free. But what if you want to visualize your hard-earned data in a graph, a map, or in some other way? This spring, the brains over at Google released Fusion Tables — a new platform that makes data integration, collaboration, and basic visualizations easy and user-friendly.

To the user, Fusion Tables feel a lot like Google Docs, with “owned by me” and “shared with me” data archives, and an “invite” option. But instead of documents, Fusion Tables allows you to create, upload and edit data tables and share them with your collaborators or with the rest of the world. Then, without any tech know-how, you can turn all that into basic maps and graphs. I gave the mapping function a shot with a shared data table called “Number of Threatened Species by Country and Group (1997)” found in the table gallery. This density map, of countries ranked according to number of threatened species in 1997, is what I came up with:

And there you have it! A map, created for free, with shared data and basic tech skills. I can’t vouch for the accuracy of this map or the data source, but any old dataset can highlight the relative ease of the Fusion Table process. What excites me is the obvious application of this tool set to nonprofits, many of whom are working with a severely limited budget. GIS and other advanced mapping tools are expensive and complex; with Fusion Tables, the nonprofit with even the tightest budget can intergrate data and churn out basic visuals.

Imagine, for example, a conservation nonprofit has a set of great location data about each stream system in their county, and another organization has some basic biological survey data for each. Neither have much time or money. With Fusion Tables, they can upload each of their data sets, join them together, and create a density map to communicate the highest priority areas in which they might want to focus their activities.

The nonprofit community needs access to data and visualization tools on the cheap. Does anyone have experience using Fusion Tables to add to, share, or visualize their data sets? Interested to hear some reviews…