I’m finding Google Lab’s Dataset Publishing Language (DSPL) pretty fascinating.

Upload a set of data, and it will do some semi-spiffy visualizations of it. (As Apryl DeLancey points out, Martin Wattenberg and Fernanda Viegas now work for Google, so if they’re working on this project, the visualizations are going to get much better.) More important, the data you upload is now publicly available. And, more important than that, the site wants you to upload your data in Google’s DSPL format. DSPL aims at getting more metadata into datasets, making them more understandable, integrate-able, and re-usable.

So, let’s say you have spreadsheets of “statistical time series for unemployment and population by country, and population by gender for US states.” (This is Google’s example in its helpful tutorial.)

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