"We're trying to create an ecosystem around structured data," said Halevy. "The Web [is] so successful because there's an ecosystem that makes it easy to create data, it makes it easy to discover data, and therefore things happen." A similar ecosystem for the information now buried in databases that are difficult to access and interpret would "bring a lot of value from data that exists already," Halevy said.

Democratized data can have real effects, including opening up governments and alerting aid workers to unfolding disasters, Halevy and his engineering manager Sreeram Balakrishnan said.

But the Fusion Tables that was also recently added does not yet return many results, despite Google's work to create an algorithm that can differentiate quality structured data from, for example, HTML tables used simply to format text.

There's still a way to go before the vast troves of information socked away in databases can be accessed and understood by an average user.

The IDG News Service