Non-technical data users such as journalists, NGOs, social scientists and activists have Big Data challenges that are ignored by the typical focus on analytics and off-line computation. Although their individual tables may be small they can be combined with data from a vast pool of public structured data. Their computation requirements are driven by the need to serve high QPS, low-latency, interactive visualizations of large data sets that may be actively updated. Google Fusion Tables was developed with the needs of these users in mind. It provides them the tools and infrastructure to integrate multiple related data sets, interactively visualize this data and eventually embed the visualizations as part of their storytelling.
Based on real world examples, we discussed the specific challenges we faced to build an infrastructure to support interactive customizable maps over large complex geospatial data sets. In parallel we are also developing infrastructure to enhance the ability of our users to find and combine with other relevant public data sets, either within GFT or as HTML tables on the Web and visualize it in novel ways regardless of data size. More examples of prominent uses of GFT can be found in our gallery [6].