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Google Teaching Science
Search (and other things) giant Google is all set to store the worlds open source scientific data at Google research. The project has been dubbed at Palimpsest. Since the data will be open source, it will be accessible by all – scientists and non professionals alike. The project was set to be showcased at the Science Foo Camp – a science fair at Google campus in August last year, but missed its deadline and is scheduled to be launched soon.
Since the amount of data it will host is vast, there are technological challenges like being able to transfer large volumes of data quickly to the end user. The company will leverage the data visualization technology it acquired from Trendalyzer, and will offer algorithms on the site for examining and probing the data. The site will also include YouTube-style commenting and annotating features, which will allow for quicker sporting of information. This will allow for making massive data sets – like all the images from Hubble Space Telescope – accessible to the public.
So how will all this data be uploaded to Google? In a post by Science Foo attendee, the collection plan was described thus: “(They) are providing a 3 TB drive array (Linux RAID5). The array is provided in ‘suitcase’ and shipped to anyone who wants to send the data to Google. Anyone interested gives Google the files tree, and they SLURP the data off the drive. I believe they can extend this to a larger array (my memory says 20TB.)”