[CAnet - news] Google to Host Terabytes of Open-Source Science Data

For more information on this item please visit my blog at 
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[From a posting by Randy Burge on Dewayne Hendricks list --BSA]

Google to Host Terabytes of Open-Source Science Data
By Alexis Madrigal
January 18, 2008 | 2:23:21 PM

Categories: Dataset, Research

<http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2008/01/google-to-provi.html>

Sources at Google have disclosed that the humble domain,
http://research.google.com 
, will soon provide a home for terabytes of open-source scientific  
datasets. The storage will be free to scientists and access to the  
data will be free for all. The project, known as Palimpsest and first  
previewed to the scientific community at the Science Foo camp at the  
Googleplex last August, missed its original launch date this week, but  
will debut soon.

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.

The storage would fill a major need for scientists who want to openly  
share their data, and would allow citizen scientists access to an  
unprecedented amount of data to explore. For example, two planned  
datasets are all 120 terabytes of Hubble Space Telescope data and the  
images from the Archimedes Palimpsest, the 10th century manuscript  
that inspired the Google dataset storage project.

UPDATE (12:01pm): Attila Csordas of Pimm has a lot more details on the  
project, including a set of slides that Jon Trowbridge of Google gave  
at a presentation in Paris last year. WIRED's own Thomas Goetz also  
mentioned the project in his fantastic piece of freeing dark data.

One major issue with science's huge datasets is how to get them to  
Google. In this post by a SciFoo attendee over at business|bytes|genes| 
molecules, the collection plan was described:

(Google people) are providing a 3TB drive array (Linux RAID5). The  
array is provided in "suitcase" and shipped to anyone who wants to  
send they data to Google. Anyone interested gives Google the file  
tree, and they SLURP the data off the drive. I believe they can extend  
this to a larger array (my memory says 20TB).

You can check out more details on why hard drives are the preferred  
distribution method at Pimm. And we hear that Google is hunting for  
cool datasets, so if you have one, it might pay to get in touch with  
them.=

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