All,
I discovered an excellent presentation about a new project of Google's called "Google Public Data Explorer," which works with live statistical data held on the sites of the IMF, Eurostat and other organizations. Google does not store these statistics locally, but takes them and does some amazing things with them. The presentation is at http://fora.tv/2010/04/18/Logan_Symposium_Google_Public_Data_Explorer and the tool is http://www.google.com/publicdata/home
One point that he made that was especially pertinent to this list, and especially to some of the things I have said is when he mentions the search for "number of children per woman in the world" and Google automatically translates that to "Fertility rate, World," and has some very nice links right into this new tool. I personally find this translation amazing since it is apparently taking a natural language example and translating it into some kind of authorized form. When I tried to replicate this however, I was trying other words, such as "number of births woman in the world" and it didn't work. From my very quick investigation, I think the word "per" triggers something in Google because if I change it to "number of births per woman in the world" it works.
This may make searching different languages rather strange ("per" may mean several different things in other languages), but this is not to detract from a fabulous new tool, and more important for us: perhaps a tacit recognition from Google that some kind of authority control may be useful and necessary.
James Weinheimer j.weinheimer_at_aur.edu<mailto:j.weinheimer_at_aur.edu>
Director of Library and Information Services
The American University of Rome
via Pietro Roselli, 4
00153 Rome, Italy
voice- 011 39 06 58330919 ext. 258
fax-011 39 06 58330992
Received on Tue May 04 2010 - 08:42:39 EDT