As someone with valuable data at your fingertips you might be interested in what the new Google Public Data Explorer has to offer.

With the explorer now declared open, that means you are free to show off your data in the graphic displays Google have hatched. This is quite different from the platform being 'open' in terms of the software and the data used.

But, before we get into the openness issues, let's start at the beginning with you and the data you're just dying to share.

You don't actually upload data to Google, you just give a link to your data sets through their interface. If you are representing a company then you are taken to this completely monster form about the data held in your organisation. But even though it is rather a task to complete, all of the description is necessary to use the data in a remotely sensible way. For example if it is geographic data then you are asked about the coding system used for the locations, essential for placing the data on a map.

Once you're through the lengthy process of describing the data to Google, in return you have a display that is hosted by Google and you can embed in webpages. But you can't download and run the software yourself or even download the data displayed (see the FAQ reply to "Can I download the data?") . If there was a mistake in the data then Google refer you through to the user who linked and described the data, so you'd better hope they're understanding.

Even though there are restrictions on what you can do with the data, there still might be good data to explore.

To guide you through what's available Google provide a list of the data published so far. There is already a range of EuroStat data such as Minimum Wage in Europe and monthly unemployment figures in Europe. To show their commitment Google have added some of their own data on search trends in that case for interest in the term 'flu'. This kind of data has been shown over at Information is Beautiful which demonstrates how the ability to combine data is so valuable.

Can you combine this data in interesting ways? Not really. Not at the moment. But within one data set you can view it in a number of different formats and select from a range of different variables.

The resulting graphs look very professional and adding a data set with your name attached is very good for being found on Google as these graphs turn up in regular Google searches if the key terms match well.

We plan to take a closer look at the issues around the Google Public Data Explorer in another post, but these are first impressions. What do you think?