Cool idea, it is impressive that it is still around - alas it is flawed the same way all scientific data is flawed. There is no metadata - all you have is an awkward imprecise textual search of the abstract that comes with the data. Good luck hosting the world's data that way.
One nice thing about digital data, as opposed to physical artefacts, is that you don’t need to keep digital data’s metadata attached to the data “at the hip.” Through the magic of cryptographic hash algorithms, you can just keep your data sets floating around “raw” (like in these torrents), and then, elsewhere , ascribe metadata to the hash of the content it is meant to annotate. Then, later, you can reassemble them…
> s that you don’t need to keep digital data’s metadata attached to the data “at the hip.”
This is especially true for research oriented files, where consumers are often unable or unwilling to maintain a functional metadata store, and do a lot of manual file handling. Saying "well, somebody could have set up a super-awesome metadata system that track this" doesn't magically make those resources exist.