一些经典广告词，留作备用：

． Good to the last drop． 滴滴香浓，意犹未尽。（麦斯威尔咖啡）

2． Obey your thirst． 服从你的渴望。（雪碧）

3． The new digital era． 数码新时代。（索尼影碟机）

4． We lead． Others copy． 我们领先，他人仿效。（理光复印机）

5． Impossible made possible． 使不可能变为可能。（佳能打印机）

6． Take time to indulge． 尽情享受吧！（雀巢冰激凌）

7． The relentless pursuit of perfection． 不懈追求完美。 （凌志轿车）

8． Poetry in motion， dancing close to me． 动态的诗，向我舞近。（丰田汽车）

9． Come to where the flavor is． Marlboro Country．

　　光临风韵之境——万宝路世界。（万宝路香烟）

10．To me， the past is black and white， but the future is always color．

　　对我而言，过去平淡无奇；而未来，却是绚烂缤纷。（轩尼诗酒）

11. Just do it. 只管去做。（耐克运动鞋）

12. Ask for more. 渴望无限。（百事流行鞋）

13. The taste is great. 味道好极了。（雀巢咖啡）

14. Feel the new space. 感受新境界。（三星电子）

15. Intelligence everywhere.        智慧演绎，无处不在。（摩托罗拉手机）

16. The choice of a new generation.       新一代的选择。（百事可乐）

17. We integrate, you communicate.        我们集大成，您超越自我。（三菱电工）

18. Take TOSHIBA, take the world.       拥有东芝，拥有世界。（东芝电子）

19. Let’s make things better.     让我们做得更好。（飞利浦电子）

20. No business too small, no problem too big.     

没有不做的小生意，没有解决不了的大问题。 （IBM公司）

Abstract

Project could lead to more 'intelligent' web pages.

Google launched a new service last week, Google Base. It allows anyone to upload files for free to its massive server farms, making the data instantly searchable. Although mainly aimed at online markets for such things as homes and jobs, scientists say the facility could have important implications for data-sharing in science, and perhaps boost efforts to make the web more 'intelligent'.

As well as letting people upload data, Google Base lets users describe the data with simple tags that others can then use in searches. It also allows users to structure the data by adding fields on the fly. So a web page holding a scientific article might have fields for 'author', 'journal', 'publication date' and other bibliometric information.

That might not sound like a very big deal. But advocates say that this allows web content to be structured as databases on a large scale. For a start, that makes it simple for any scientist to share data, and store it in ways that allow computers to search and retrieve it.

Scientists are still "in the Dark Ages" when it comes to sharing data, says David Haussler, director of the Center for Biomolecular Science and Engineering at the University of California at Santa Cruz. Data falling outside the relatively few big international databases, such as those for gene sequences, protein structures and astronomy data, mainly end up in supplementary tables accompanying journal articles, he says, and are "stored in some non-indexable, inconsistent and inconvenient format, if indeed they are kept at all".

Google Base or similar services could help, says Ian Foster, a computer scientist at Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois and co-inventor of the Grid concept, in which many computers work together to provide large amounts of processing power and data storage. Science badly needs "something that would make it trivial for individuals and communities to create and share scientific data, and the programs that operate on those data", he says.

"To have a way to easily cross-examine multiple kinds and sources of data would be a real boon to research," agrees Paul Myers, a bioinformatician from the University of Minnesota, Morris. "I think Google is getting in early on what could be an immensely important tool."

Smart systems

Google Base may also signal a modest start for the web to move towards the 'intelligent' network originally envisaged by Tim Berners-Lee when he invented the web at CERN, the European Laboratory for Particle Physics in Geneva, Switzerland, in 1989.

Most web pages are designed to be read by humans, and don't contain additional descriptive information that can be interpreted by computers. This limits their usefulness, especially for users carrying out searches. For example, it's not currently possible to search the web to find "only peer-reviewed papers dealing with experiments where the CCR5 protein activates the PYK2 protein". And when reading a paper online, you can't ask the computer to replot a graph adding in extra data sets.

Berners-Lee champions what he calls a 'semantic web', where tags added to pages would allow computers to 'understand' what the pages contain. This means computers can ask whether the data meet certain criteria and merge data sets from different sources.

But although the semantic web is fast gaining ground in certain specialist areas such as bioinformatics, it has yet to take off in a big way. Scientists say Google Base could change that by bringing structured web pages to the masses. "The big issue here is whether services like this will help bootstrap the semantic web," says Greg Tyrelle, a proteomics researcher at Chang Guan University in Taiwan.

Google power

"Flexible online storage of arbitrary data, including scientific data, is going to be a major area of research over the next couple of years," says Leigh Dodds, a web expert at publisher Ingenta. "Google Base takes that a step further by widening it out to everyone," although he adds that he would like to see governments and universities doing more to promote such services, rather than leaving it to Google.

Scientists point out, however, that Google has been prominent in its absence from work on the semantic web in the World Wide Web consortium (W3C), the body that creates web standards. They also acknowledge that Google Base is a pretty crude service so far, especially compared with sophisticated specialist databases such as GenBank and UniProt. All you can do is put in information, and then search it — there's no way to extract or compute the data.

But most researchers believe that will change fast. Google has been a pioneer in creating what are known as 'application programming interfaces' to its other services, such as Google Maps. These allow anyone to write programs that can access Google's databases, and mix and match its content with other data to create completely new products.

"If Google wants to turn Google Base into more than just a tool for finding information, and into something scientists can actually use to explore data, then more is needed," says Mark Gernstein, a bioinformatician at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut.

But observers such as Foster believe such progress could happen fast. "Google has much relevant technology and expertise," he says. "If it forms the right partnerships and dedicates sufficient resources, it could have a tremendous impact."

"Google Base looks a little simple right now, and it's not clear exactly how to tap into Google's power," adds Myers. "But we've got to start somewhere."