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Simon Willison’s Weblog

Google Base is interesting

I’m still trying to get my head around Google Base. Here’s a brain-dump of my thinking so far. First, some links.

Base is a very interesting product for a whole bunch of reasons. The data model is surprisingly simple on the surface: all items have a title, description, (optional) external URL, a “type” and a set of labels (a.k.a. tags) and “attributes”. Attributes are something for tag enthusiasts to get excited by—they’re name/value pairs that are kind of like tags in that you can apply them to anything, but more structured and with a greater level of implied meaning.

Attributes instantly made me think of geotagging on Flickr, where tags are overloaded to store latitude and longitude values (example here). Having first class support for this kind of extensible data is a very powerful concept.

Another interesting problem that the Google Base data model could be used to tackle is Wikipedia’s WikiProjects. If you look at any US Navy ship entry on Wikipedia (example) you’ll see a table on the right hand side of standard attributes relating to that ship—things like Length, Displacement, Armament and so on. This data isn’t really structured—it’s just a wiki table, manually maintained by participants of the Ships WikiProject.

Obviously this data would be more valuable if it was structured in a way that allowed queries to be made against it. Base-like attributes provide a way of doing this.

There’s definitely a trend towards this kind of loose data model at the moment. JotSpot allows all pages within a wiki to have as many extra name/value attribute pairs as you like (even the wiki body itself is internally implemented as a special attribute), and Ning works along similar lines.

Base currently allows bulk importing of data using tab delimited files, RSS or Atom. There are no outward bound APIs which is a notable omission—I wouldn’t be at all surprised to see them added in the next few weeks.

Posted 16th November 2005 at 12:34 pm

This is Google Base is interesting by Simon Willison, posted on 16th November 2005.

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9 comments

  1. It will be open to heaps of commercial spam like abuse and could possibly strangle and poison itself in time if not strictly regulated.

    Robert Wellock - 16th November 2005 14:04 - #

  2. I am still learning this new Google tool to.It looks very interesting to me that it can publish rss and atom feeds to Froogle for merchants which beats the heck outta having to add iteams via Googles data sheets.

    Jessica - 18th November 2005 22:54 - #

  3. Hi there, is there a way that you have found to show Hotmail and Yahoo inboxes on the google homepage in a similar way to googlemail?

    Josh - 19th November 2005 13:54 - #

  4. Off-topic, but kee-rist, that blink to the cameras every 400m is maddening.

    I suppose it's a matter of time until we're all totally surveiled, but I certainly wouldn't trust my government to that much information without public scrutiny.

    I hope there's a healthy "who watches the watchers?" protest in UK over this.

    Jeremy Dunck - 20th November 2005 02:47 - #

  5. I'm currently thinking of making available most of my content at quotationsbook.com. My general worry is that Google Base doesn't have attribution features unless specified in the file. Furthermore, this content is the driving force and IP of my web traffic.

    I have partially made content available through feeds, but I should think, as a content publisher (and not a seller of goods) - this doesn't hold weight unless a solid attribution and link through structure is put in place to create a win-win for all. Given the availability of my feeds.quotationsbook.com catalogue, people can already make structured queries against it - as Chris Pirillo is currently doing.

    Google need to think about doing a Yahoo! like meta tree or tagged classification (with mod), since opening up tagging to any values could have dire consequences. There comes a point when automation and inviting classification from the world don't meet. Hand classification might be required if Google Base is to succeed. I don't hold tagging as anything more that lightweight, since it's open to abuse, hence I use the term classification.

    I think I know where they are going with this! We might eventually see an expanded version of "Did you mean?" - in the style of Ask Jeeves.

    Amit - 20th November 2005 12:49 - #

  6. I think Google Base is so wide in its possibilities that we are bound to miss one or two while exploring it.

    Spammers will find the first abuse and have already done that :-(

    The main reason to use Google Base IMHO is to add yet another selling channel to your online business.

    Doing that and sustaining that will trigger a whole new array of services for companies like mine.

    I have started some experiments already and I know that more will come. Just wish there was an API.

    Rob Hofker - 23rd November 2005 07:50 - #

  7. I'm still grasping Google Base but what seems to be missing is a powerful query interface. Is querying limited to the basic search box?

    Sérgio Nunes - 23rd November 2005 22:42 - #

  8. I like the Google base just got done playing with it and like what I have seen so far. But because I am not selling anything online it probably wont do me any good anytime soon.

    Ashley Bowers - 27th November 2005 00:17 - #

  9. I just wrote a post on kragen-tol about semistructured data, in particular how services like Google Base can converge on usefully shared attribute namespaces.

    Kragen Sitaker - 1st December 2005 02:30 - #

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