[uf-discuss] Fwd: Uploading the Semantic Web into Google Base?

[David Janes -- BlogMatrix]

I'm forwarding this e-mail from the semantic web mailing list as there 
seems to be some interesting ideas that can be drawn upon.

Here's [1] an example FOAF profile on Google Base. Looks very doable for 
hCards, no?

Regards, etc...
David
http://www.blogmatrix.com

[1] http://base.google.com/base/items?oid=18377492770755894565

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: 	Uploading the Semantic Web into Google Base?
Resent-Date: 	Mon, 05 Dec 2005 09:44:43 +0000
Resent-From: 	semantic-web at w3.org
Date: 	Mon, 5 Dec 2005 10:38:48 +0100
From: 	Chris Bizer <bizer at zedat.fu-berlin.de>
To: 	<semantic-web at w3.org>



Hi all,

we have developed a crawler that collects FOAF profiles from the Web and
uploads them into Google Base.

The profiles that our crawler has uploaded so far are found at:
http://base.google.com/base/search?authorid=1107889

It's nice to see how geo coordinates in the profiles get rendered as Google
maps: http://base.google.com/base/items?oid=396209429990798149
And it's strange to "own" Tim Berners-Lees profile on Google Base ;-)
http://base.google.com/base/items?oid=12665418913991123756

If you want us to upload your profile also, please add it to the FOAF
Bulletin Board http://rdfweb.org/topic/FOAFBulletinBoard and it will be
included in our next crawler run. If you want to be removed from Google
Base, please send us a mail and we will remove you.

It's strange that there hasn't been too much discussion in the Semantic Web
community about Google base yet. Should we be happy, that Google provides us
with a fast repository and a nice search interface? Or should we be critical
because a single company is trying to gain a dominant market position by
building a single central Web data repository? Should we be happy that
Google is promoting the idea of publishing structured information on the
Web? Or should we be critical to their (over-)simplification of the RDF data
model?

All comments are welcome.

Cheers,

Chris Bizer and Richard Cyganiak

-- 
Chris Bizer
Freie Universität Berlin
Phone: +49 30 838 54057
Mail: chris at bizer.de
Web: www.bizer.de