Slashdot Mirror
Google To Offer Free Database Storage for Scientists
An anonymous reader writes "Google has revealed a new project aimed at the scientific community. Called Palimpsest, the site research.google.com will play host to 'terabytes of open-source scientific datasets'. It was originally previewed for scientists last August . 'Building on the company's acquisition of the data visualization technology, Trendalyzer, from the oft-lauded, TED presenting Gapminder team, Google will also be offering algorithms for the examination and probing of the information. The new site will have YouTube-style annotating and commenting features.'"
As a neural engineering researcher who routinely generates terabyte size datasets, I have to say that I both like this idea and think it is unlikely to succeed. I would love to have a place to store large datasets and access them from wherever I am at. However, since these datasets will be open sourced, I will be extremely unlikely to put any dataset on google until I am certain I have extracted all of the publishable findings from it. I think that most researchers after putting in years of effort and a lot money into acquiring a dataset will also think twice about open sourcing their data. If the TOS where to include some means for controlling publications which resulted from analysis of the data, then it might be more likely to succeed.
As a researcher myself (particle physics), I echo others comments in this thread that a) its a nice idea but b) isnt going to happen. There are three main problems, the first two are solvable, the third isnt
1) trivially, 3TB is no where near enough to store my data
Bit of a non issue for the overall concept but if google wants my data, they really are going to have to up the storage by a few orders of magnitude.
2) as others stated, we work really really hard to acquire our data, research is about 10% inspiration, 90% perspiration. We are not giving up our data till we have milked it for all its worth.
This again is solvable, we release our data after we have all the publishable results we can think of and them let others have a crack. Somebody might find something useful and if not, well its great for younger scientists as you say. At the very least, people can reconfirm results at a later date easier. Main reason I like it.
3) The deal killer, for my field and I suspect others, it is really really difficult to understand our data and its really easy to misinterpret it.
New particles have been "discovered" so many times by grad students (and some professors who should know better) in particle physics data that I'm terrified of what somebody with no training outside the system might conclude from the data. At CDF (a fermilab expt) it took us (800 physicists) about 2-3 years to understand the data from the experiment enough to get proper physics results out of it. Even now, it takes a new comer about a year to get upto speed and thats with help from all the experts. But its very easy to think you understand things after a few weeks when infact your missing some incredibly subtle point and so I'm sure we would be flooded by bogus results due to misinterpretations from the data if we release it.
Anyway this all comes from a particle physics view point but I suspect quite a few other fields will be similar.