When it comes to dataset curation for public entities it’s generally up to them to purchase or learn software, run with it, and then publish their own results. Since public institutions generate a great deal of data, and generally run on statistics from economy to how to visualize population and government goals it’s extremely useful for them to be able to release that data not just to the media but to allow the public to digest it directly.

Google has introduced a cloud-based web data visualization interface for the everyman in the Google Public Data Explorer,

Over the past two years, we’ve made public data easier to find, explore and understand in several ways, providing unemployment figures, population statistics and world development indicators in search results, and introducing the Public Data Explorer tool. Together with our data provider partners, we’ve curated 27 datasets including more than 300 data metrics. You can now use the Public Data Explorer to visualize everything from labor productivity (OECD) to Internet speed (Ookla) to gender balance in parliaments (UNECE) to government debt levels (IMF) to population density by municipality (Statistics Catalonia), with more data being added every week.

Today, we’re opening the Public Data Explorer to your data. We’re making a new data format, the Dataset Publishing Language (DSPL), openly available, and providing an interface for anyone to upload their datasets. DSPL is an XML-based format designed from the ground up to support rich, interactive visualizations like those in the Public Data Explorer. The DSPL language and upload interface are available in Google Labs.

This sort of production from Google is actually extremely interesting as it puts simple visualization and dataset curation in the hands of—well, everyone.

What I’d like to see from this sort of public-availability of simple data visualization products is a connection to a site like Wikipedia. As long as we can vet data sets and match them to organizations (via some sort of cryptographically signed verification) we could use that to double-check statistics published by media organizations and see for ourselves if they’re using a proper visualization. It is so easy to mislead the public with statistics and the nature of statistics is difficult enough for people who have taken classes in it.

The power of the Internet happens to be the ability to collate context onto data. The Google Data Viewer can do exactly that and it would be an excellent addition to articles published that involve a lot of public data—in fact, while it will probably not revolutionize the way John Q Public sees data, it may be an extreme aid in allowing public organizations to provide their own statistics so that article writers can access it, do their research, and show it to their readers all the while giving them the confidence that they can fact-check it themselves.

Further, with this sort of public curation on the table it would boost the availability of big data to organizations a lot like Heritage Health who are looking to make us healthier using all the data produced my the medical industry. The Google public sets include things like employment data, and regional population data, a lot of things that could give rise to all sorts of citizen statistical journalism.

Either that or Google’s Public Data Explorer will catalyze a huge boom in infographics.