[wdmmg-discuss] Budgetiser...

[K Corrick]

Hi Tony,
Embarrassingly (as the non-geek in these parts) I was also wondering about
Fusion tables, but presumed that these were just new to me. They look
incredibly powerful.

Has anyone had any experience using them? Thoughts?

A friend of mine has also let me know that Google are thinking quite a bit
about the area of searching large data sets (unsurpisingly) at the moment,
for which small clues seem to be appearing. I'm trying to find out more, as
apparently there was an internal presentation made that would be very
prescient for WDMMG.

Kathryn



On Fri, Jul 30, 2010 at 1:33 PM, Tony Hirst <a.j.hirst at open.ac.uk> wrote:

>  So after seeing Rufux, albeit briefly, earlier this week, i'm now feeling
> suitably guilty about not having been keeping up with how much stuff you've
> been managing to do around wdmmg...
>
> Looking through the last few days msgs, and having a quick look at the
> budgetizer [ http://www.wheredoesmymoneygo.org/budget/budgetizer/ ] things
> that came to my mind were:
>
> - it seems to use google spreadsheets gdata list api rather than eg
> visualisation query language (
> http://code.google.com/apis/visualization/documentation/querylanguage.html )
> which is the one I've played with in the past. (Though looking at data api
> that's the one I guess Google support most heavily?). Is the google
> spreadsheets data api the "preferred" api for getting data out of google
> spreadsheets in anger? (Also, are you programmatically putting data into
> goog spreadsheets via the api, or uisng the UI to upload/paste in data? I
> think you can do more to structure data, eg defining logical tables (
> http://code.google.com/apis/spreadsheets/data/3.0/developers_guide_protocol.html#CreatingTableRecords )
> if data is submitted via the api. )
>
> - have you looked at google fusion tables at all? Again, there's an api (
> http://code.google.com/apis/fusiontables/docs/developers_guide.html ) but
> other advantages include:
> - bigger tables;
> - ability to merge datasets and essentially "join" subsets of data from
> separate tables via a UI, as well as provision of interactive visuliastion
> tools within that environment.
>
> What I've been mulling over lately is different sorts of users/ability to
> engage. So for example, budgetizer has interactive charts for an end user,
> but what about the step before that? eg suppose i am the person who has a
> big data set and is looking for the best ways of visualising it? Creating
> charts in google spreadsheets is one way for me to do that - visually
> playing with the data looking for the best representation that could then be
> used in a budgetizer like UI, but the interactive chart creation tools in
> Google Fusion tables is maybe even easier?
>
> tony
>
> PS apologies if this has been discussed before, or is wildly off topic... I
> will try to keep up from now on... ;-)
>
> PPS on the budgetizer UI, in chrome on a mac, unticking checkbox selectors
> for graph type doesn't seem to undraw the corresponding graphs?
>
> -----------------------------------------------------------
> Tony Hirst
> mailto:a.j.hirst at open.ac.uk <a.j.hirst at open.ac.uk>
> blog: http://ouseful.info
> twitter: @psychemedia
>
> Dept. of Communication & Systems,
> The Open University, Walton Hall,
> Milton Keynes, MK7 6AA, UK
>
> Tel: +44 (0)19086 52789, m./SMS 07771 330 372
>
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