Uploading the Semantic Web into Google Base?

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@bizer.de
Web: www.bizer.de

Received on Monday, 5 December 2005 09:44:39 UTC