As an increasing number of organizations feels the need to open up their data for public usage, it also arises the need for tools able to unlock the intrinsic  value of such data. Following a trend that already saw the creation of a public data search feature, Google Lab just launched the Google Public Data Explorer, an experimental visualization tool.

Right now, there are 13 dataset available, including a subset of the World Development Indicators, Minimum Wage in Europe, Unemployment in Europe, Harmonized Index of Consumer Prices in Europe and others. There are four data visualization styles, including bar graph, line graph, map or bubble. Data are visualized on a time line, they can be animated to reflect their evolution in time, and they can be included in third party application and Web sites, as in the following example.

In addition, Google released a list of the 80 most popular data and statistics search topics for their public data search feature. The complete list is available here.