Google Fusion Tables: Geo-spatially connecting database data

By Wesley Fryer On September 26, 2011 · Tagged With: gti2011 · Add Comment

These are my notes from Sean Maday‘s presentation on Google Fusion Tables at the September 26, 2011, Google Geo-Teacher Institute in Lewiston, Maine. MY THOUGHTS ARE IN ALL CAPS.

Sean Maday is a geospatial engineer at Google. He served as an Air Force intelligence officer from 2005 to 2010, and formerly worked for a research and development lab at the U.S. Air Force Academy. He holds a bachelor’s and master’s degree from Michigan State University.

Google Earth has now been downloaded and installed over a billion times

How do I make my maps link up to Google Maps or Google Earth?
– previously this has taken a lot of coding

Now we have Google Fusion Tables
– these have been around for 2 years
– spatially aware database in the cloud
– you interact with it via a web browser
– doesn’t matter if you’re on a desktop, laptop, or Chromebook
– power of the processing takes place with Google’s servers

Can show overlays of a heat map of earthquake intensity since 1973, and the location of nuclear power plans around the world

newspapermap.com
– newspapers are discoverable geographically

MY NOTES FROM THIS SESSION ARE WOEFULLY INADEQUATE TO CONVEY MY EXCITEMENT FOR THE INFO AND POWERFUL TOOLS SEAN JUST TOLD US ABOUT. I DID AUDIO RECORD HIS SESSION AND GOT HIS PERMISSION TO SHARE IT. GOOGLE FUSION TABLES ARE THE MOST EXCITING AND IMPORTANT THING I’VE LEARNED SO FAR HERE AT THE INSTITUTE… THIS IS THE REASON I TRAVELED TO MAINE… TO LEARN ABOUT THIS. WOW!

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