New ‘Data Commons’ Gemini Extension lets you ‘visualize data about complex topics’

Abner Li | Jul 15 2024 - 8:17 pm PT

Gemini today offers six first-party extensions and it’s now getting a seventh from Data Commons, which is a Google initiative that aims to organize “the world’s publicly available data and makes it more accessible and useful.”

…since 2017, the Data Commons team has sought to standardize and process thousands of data sets from publicly available, reliable sources

This includes the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics, and United States Department of Commerce, with over 200 sources to date. There are thousands of data sets covering demographics, economics, education, housing, public health, climate, sustainability, and biomedicine. Google notes that “Data Commons does not collect or own any data.”

There’s data from 194 countries, in some countries down to the state or county level.

In September of 2023, Google started applying large language models (LLMs) to let you ask questions in a natural manner. However:

…results come straight from Data Commons, including a link to the original data source; thus the output is not generated by the LLM. This approach allows Data Commons to avoid some of the current known limitations of LLMs around factuality in some instances.

You can now access @Data Commons using Gemini. It can specifically “visualize data about complex topics like climate change, jobs, economics and health.” For example: “show me a breakdown of business types in Florida.” This was announced in May as part of the broader Gemini Education unveil.

It’s enabled by default, and joins Google Flights, Google Hotels, Google Maps, Google Workspace, YouTube, and YouTube Music.

Speaking of Gemini Extensions, Google is making them “available in Beta for Gemini for Google Workspace add-on subscribers” today. This includes Gmail and Drive, with Google noting how “Workspace data will not be used to train Gemini’s public model.”