Do you have data with location or time information? Would you like a simple way to show that data visually, on a map, or perhaps a timeline. Google Fusion Tables may be the answer, and they were explained by Mano Marks, Senior Developer Advocate at Google, to the GIS Group at the British Computer Society this evening.

Google Fusion Tables allow you to keep tables of data in Google’s cloud, manipulate it, visualise it and present it online. If the data have a spatial element, they can be displayed on a Google Map, or, if there is a time element, as a time series or storyline. As Mano Marks put it, it’s an attempt to provide GIS functionality with the ease of use of a spreadsheet.

I had a happy hour or two playing around with some data – a list of theatres and a list of plays I’ve seen recently, with links to my reviews.
Here’s a map of the theatres:

And here’s the storyline, showing when the shows will finish, so you can see if something is still playing It is a bit messy, though might improve with more data. A click on the play title takes you straight to the review.

There are also graphs and other maps to play with, and its very easy to embed them into a site like this (unless you happen to be on wordpress.com, where iframes are a no-no). Everything I’ve done here is quite simple, and needed only the ability to drive a spreadsheet and a little basic html.

But is it really a GIS, or just a simple mapping tool? The ability to include kml in your table, and so produce polygons and lines, takes it beyond the realm of sticking pins in Google Maps and allows more complex features to be built, but to get to the some of the stronger GIS features, you need to use the api, and do a little programming. Using the API, it is simple to do basic spatial queries, looking for the distance between two features or seeing whether a location lies within a polygon (is the customer’s address within the pizza shop’s delivery area). Although the data can be filtered using the standard interface, that is very limited. I can’t, for instance, select only those plays which will close after today, to show a storyline of plays that you could still go to see, without resorting to the API.

While it is not as easy as a spreadsheet, with a little creativity and willingness to delve into kml, this tool can do a lot, and it is certainly easier than Quantum GIS, or even Google Earth on its own. I suspect its main use will be to allow those of us who run small websites, and aren’t too keen to spend a lot of time coding, or learning a more conventional GIS, to incorporate some geospatial features.