Thursday, February 17, 2011

Digging Into Google Public Data Explorer

Google public data explorer seems to be a very useful tool. I generated this graph below, showing which cities in the Santa Clara county of California has seen increase of Asian population, as sampled from the ethnicity of enrolled students.

No surprise in seeing Asian population increase in "good-school" districts like Cupertino and Fremont, but interesting enough, what is Orchard Elementary, which has shot from 20% to more than 40% and emerge as one of the heavily populated Asian communities in the past 5 years? Guessed right, that's the North Valley, San Jose area, which saw the appearance of a new Costco, Lowes, tons of new town-houses, and a new shopping center currently under construction.

It would be even more interesting to use the google API (Dataset Publishing Language) to upload my various junk data and see how they visualize. :)