There's a short article in Nature (subscribers only I'm afraid) this week about Google Base and its potential impacts on the science community. In particular whether it might galvanise greater data sharing between scientists.
I've been corresponding with Declan Butler, the author of the piece, on this and some related topics recently, and he ended up quoting me:
“Flexible online storage of arbitrary data, including scientific data, is going to be a major area of research over the next couple of years,” says Leigh Dodds, a web expert at publisher Ingenta. “Google Base takes that a step further by widening it out to everyone,” although he adds that he would like to see governments and universities doing more to promote such services, rather than leaving it to Google.
I said a little more than this which I thought I'd share here. I think its still early days with regards to how this kind of data can be shared. The semantic web work has a lot to offer, but there are still some issues to be dealt with both within the scientific community (easier publishing of finer-grained data, buy-in at all levels) and also the semantic web in general (trust models, data gathering).
At the moment its a bit of a one horse race; Ning offers similar flexibilities but is oriented towards different use cases IMO, so Google Base is all there is.
I would be concerned if Google Base became the only place in which this data was hosted. For publically funded research especially, the relevant institutions (universities, research councils, publishers) have a role to play.
I see a promising growth in the number of APIs oriented towards scientific metadata though, which opens possibility for some interesting "mashups".
Plenty of room for innovation still to happen.