Has anyone tried the facilities of base.google.com? It seems to be a
rudimentary repository - not set up for research outputs but for
items and events of everyday life. I suppose that it's intended to
provide an analogue of "Open Access" for a much broader range of
digital items, and one can see how the small but well-chosen sets of
metadata will benefit Google's other search services.
I did try out the "Reference Article" type and it has a few useful
fields, so perhaps it could function as a really lowlevel self-
archiving fallback for independent researchers. However, there is no
easy way to query Google base for research articles, even after you
have put them in!
What I did find very interesting is their approach to developing
schemas. Whereas others have tried folksonomies, that is community-
defined sets of keywords, Google Base adopts the same idea not to the
keywords or attribute values, but to the attributes themselves. This
if you try to search for reference articles about something bland
like "computers", you get the following search fields "Keywords,
Pages, Publication volume, Publish date" but if you search for
"Genes" you get the much richer set "Keywords, Pages, Mrna accession,
Entrez gene id, Protein accession, Gene, Author, Publication name,
Csnp, Publication date" because gene-related items are frequently
described by those attributes.
Perhaps something for the repository platforms to think about?
--
Les Carr
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