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The majority of this data is generated via public funding. So over the crusty decades there have arisen public databases of notably varied quality, curation, a
by theophrastus 11y ago
The majority of this data is generated via public funding. So over the crusty decades there have arisen public databases of notably varied quality, curation, and stability; e.g. GenBank, NCBI, SwissProt, EMBL, PIR, SBKB, PDB, ...quite a long list. (I've been involved in direct dealings with several of these sites and sometimes the histories and policies get very opaque)
Finally, the question: this is public data, (sometimes held in confidence but technically only for a "short" period), google is a private company, why should we place our trust in a for-profit organization to keep our public data publicly available without charging access fees? Admitting freely that having dealt for decades with the old model, i do have an open mind about this approach.
- roye 11y agoI don't think their intent is to replace existing database servers. My impression is that they have copied the data onto their servers to make analysis on their cloud service more attractive. For example, the fact that the 1000 Genomes data is there saves researchers from having to go to the trouble of uploading it themselves.
- kuschku 11y ago> I don't think their intent is to replace existing database servers. We thought the same with Freebase and the Knowledge Graph. It will happen again.
- jghn 11y agoHaving worked with them a bit my impression is that at a high level their intent is to get people to spend money using google cloud services. With that in mind it is not in their interest to annoy half of the field by playing shenanigans with things like data ownership