Apps and accessibility APIs for public data sets, structured to ask and answer interesting questions.
Most large public data sets, even curated collections deemed research-quality remain de facto hidden for most people because it takes a significant amount of work to download, parse, clean, and index the information so that it is useful for analysis.
Above and beyond simpler access, there is enormous potential in combining different data sets in creative ways, to ask and answer specific questions of interest, relative to a variety of fields and industries.
We follow the Open Street Map model: get people contributing data, and make that data available under an open license.
This site will host a series of applications, APIs, and open databases.
First up is a project to expand the list of known product barcodes, building upon work the Open Product Data (POD) is doing.
This server runs a clone of the current POD database, with additional tables for logging user contributions.
Some nomimal hardware is required, including a usb barcode scanner, but the software is fully open source.