http://simonwillison.net/2005-11-16T12:34:46+00:00Simon Willison2005-11-16T12:34:46+00:002005-11-16T12:34:46+00:00https://simonwillison.net/2005/Nov/16/base/#atom-tag

<p id="p-0">I'm still trying to get my head around <a href="http://base.google.com/">Google Base</a>. Here's a brain-dump of my thinking so far. First, some links.</p> <ul> <li><a href="http://base.google.com/base/about.html">Google Base FAQ</a></li> <li><a href="http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2005/11/first-base.html">Google Base introduction</a> on the Google Blog (includes testimonials)</li> <li><a href="http://www.plasticbag.org/archives/2005/11/in_which_google_base_launches.shtml">Tom's first impressions</a></li> </ul> <p id="p-1">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.</p> <p id="p-2">Attributes instantly made me think of geotagging on <a href="http://www.flickr.com/">Flickr</a>, where tags are overloaded to store latitude and longitude values (example <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/clagnut/60936865/">here</a>). Having first class support for this kind of extensible data is a very powerful concept.</p> <p id="p-3">Another interesting problem that the Google Base data model could be used to tackle is Wikipedia's <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikiproject">WikiProjects</a>. If you look at any US Navy ship entry on Wikipedia (<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Iwo_Jima_%28LHD-7%29">example</a>) 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 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Ships">Ships WikiProject</a>.</p> <p id="p-4">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.</p> <p id="p-5">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.</p> <p id="p-6">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.</p> <p>Tags: <a href="https://simonwillison.net/tags/google">google</a>, <a href="https://simonwillison.net/tags/google-base">google-base</a></p>