We’ve been hard at work since we surfaced Data Commons in Google Search last October. Some of the exciting features we’ve added include:
Internationalization Support
Place Explorer is now available in 8 languages in addition to English: German, Spanish, French, Hindi, Italian, Japanese, Korean and Russian. Additionally, support for these languages are carried forward from Google Search, here’s an example.
New Graph Browser
The Graph Browser was rewritten from the ground up to be faster and more responsive. It includes search support for the growing number of Statistical Variables available for each node, as well as redesigned to improve information density. Try it out for some nodes such as India, Unemployment Rate in Boston and Renal Cell Carcinoma.
New Scatter Plot Explorer
The new Scatter Plot Explorer enables quick visual exploration of any two statistical variables for a set of places. Try it out for Bachelor Degree Attainment vs Females per capita in California Counties or Covid-19 cases vs African Americans per capita among US States.
API Documentation Refresh
We participated in the 2020 Season of Docs, working with Anne Ulrich (@KilimAnnejaro) to completely refresh and improve our API documentation. Every API page was rewritten, in addition to new Google Sheets API tutorials. We had a wonderful time collaborating with Anne on this project and hope the improved documentation enables more developers to harness the power of our APIs.
New Stats API
We have also released a new set of APIs centered around statistics retrieval. There are different REST endpoints to retrieve a single statistical value, a statistical time series or the entire collection of statistical data for a set of places. We have used these APIs to build the new Scatter Plot Explorer and hope this enables other applications too.
New Data
As always, we continue to add more data to the Data Commons Graph. Some recent additions include:
- Indian Census (e.g. houseless and rural literacy populations)
- Reserve Bank of India’s Poverty data (e.g. rural population below poverty in Andhra Pradesh)
- FDA and additional drug information (e.g. drug from FDA, ChEMBL, PharmGKB, etc.)
- Improved Covid-19 statistics (e.g. vaccination stats from ourworldindata.org)
- US Energy Information Administration (e.g. coal and natural gas consumption for electricity)
- Expanded international data from World Bank (e.g., crime, healthstats)
- Updated data from existing sources, including:
As always, we are eager to hear from you! Please share your feedback with our team.
Carolyn on behalf of the Data Commons team