[ Thanks to Amy
Bennett for this link. ]
“CartoDB is being promoted as a more “flexible” alternative to
Google’s Fusion Tables. The tool had been in private beta for six
months. It already boasts a client list that includes The Wall
Street Journal, NASA and the United Nations Environment
Programme.“The tool can produce maps of endangered species sightings, for
example, or police activity. Developers can import and merge data
sets in various formats, including .csv and KML, and layer them
over a map from Google, Bing or OpenStreetMap.“Users can modify how much data is displayed and how it’s
displayed, seemingly simple functions which can be frustratingly
difficult to achieve using visualization tools. A user can resize
the data points or use different colors to indicate different
categories of data. Endangered mammals could be shown in brown, for
example, and endangered plants in green. SQL (Structured query
language) handles CartoDB’s database queries and CSS (cascading
style sheets) controls how the data displays.”