In its continued efforts for absolute power over all information ever created in the world, Google will be hosting open-source scientific datasets at its research section. Here are the presentation slides from Google’s Jon Trowbridge.
In the next few weeks, terabytes of data will be made available to the public. For example, all 120 terabytes of Hubble Space Telescope data is going to be online. That’s kind of cool but kind of scary too. Such a large amount of data is bound to affect lots of people on many different levels.
For scientists, data will be available for deeper research. For the scientists who generated the data, their research could be placed under more critical scrutiny. Existing data applications might be eclipsed by the data giant, or it could go the other way such that the general public grows more aware of data-type things. Mashups will in turn spring up as well as more visualization, I am sure.
All of this Doesn’t Matter If…
Of course, all of this depends on what data end up on the Google servers and how easily accessible the data are. Knowing Google, I don’t think accessibility will be a problem. Getting data will be the super hard part. Who will be willing to contribute their data? What type of data will get contributed? Will it be the good, raw data or more cleaned and processed data? Do researchers even want to share their data with the rest of the world?
It’s going to be interesting to see what goes up on Google Research in these coming weeks.
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