Fusion Tables to GeoCommons Shortcut

I saw some interesting Google Fusion Table data sets popping across Twitter yesterday and wanted to see how hard it was to push them into GeoCommons.  Chris Helm wrote a great post a while back on connecting Fusion Tables to GeoCommons, and I wanted to see if I could still follow directions.  Chris had a little hack where he uses Charles, a web debugging proxy, to capture the CSV URL that Fusion Tables generates when you request the file from the app.  I was feeling a bit lazy, so I tried the API call that Josh Livni suggested in the post:

https://www.google.com/fusiontables/api/query?sql=select+*+from+267862

The number at the end of the URL is the unique ID for the data set in Fusion Tables.  You can find the unique ID for any data set in Fusion Tables by clicking the “File” tab in the menu bar and selecting “About”.  That will give you this lightbox with the unqie ID:

In the case of this drug lab seizure data set the ID was “167001″ so the URL I loaded into GeoIQ was:

https://www.google.com/fusiontables/api/query?sql=select+*+from+167001

Magic presto I have a connection to the Fusion Table to run analysis and visualization with.  You can check out the map I did of drug lab seizures over time below.  Interesting how it picks up in 2008 and then drops off again in the back half of 2009.

So, if you want to take your Fusion Table data out for a drive – drop in the URL and have some fun.