I wrote about Fusion Tables with great excitement a year ago, concluding that the application has a potential to evolve into a formidable competitor to PostGIS, ArcSDE , Oracle Spatial or SQL Server for basic GIS applications. Although a recent addition of dynamic styling capabilities takes Fusion Tables closer to that goal, it is still a long way for the application to reach that point. Unfortunately, the implementation of Fusion Tables is in typical, of late, Google fashion – unattractive and rather complex to follow so, most likely only “hard core” developer community will be taking advantage of it. The limit of 250MB of data per account is not helping either. There is no catalogue of available data (although basic text search is enabled) and no metadata for public tables so, it will not facilitate sharing.
Nevertheless, you can already make nice and very responsive maps with Fusion Tables, as in this example from Guardian’s Data Blog:
Related Posts:
Google launches Fusion Tables
Ingenuity of Google Map architecture also its main limitation
4 comments:
Arek, I did a review of Google Fusion Tables back in May 2010 that may interest your readers: http://youtu.be/xn7mQe-MMrE
Thanks Joe for visiting and for the link to the video. Any bit of information helps! Google provides wonderful tools but guidance on how to efficiently use those tools is often hard to find.
If you're gonna link to the Guardian's example, I think it's only fair to also link to the specific blog page!
A fair comment, Anonymous although my post was on "making maps with Fusion Tables". But every link counts :-)
Here is a link to that blog page:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/2011/mar/31/deprivation-map-indices-multiple
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