Ask HN: What company/industry would you like to see open their data?

Post by SePP » Thu, Oct 08, 2009, 8:33 AM UTC

Post by dazzawazza » Thu, Oct 08, 2009, 10:10 AM UTC

sachinag wrote: post #7

In the UK, postcodes - unlike US ZIP codes, they're not free Retail product data - books, movies, music, games, electronics, etc: you can kinda do this through affiliate programs, but it's not great Drug companies - studies can be killed if the data looks bad; we should be able to see every study, completed or not, and all the associated data so we can do comparative analyses

Post by windsurfer » Thu, Oct 08, 2009, 11:02 AM UTC

smiler wrote: post #21

DarkShikari wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

http://wikileaks.org/wiki/UK_government_database_of_all_1,84...

Great... except you can't use the information legally and it will not be kept up-to-date which makes it useless I can't believe we have to pay for the postcode data in the UK. It should be freely available

Post by hypest » Fri, Oct 09, 2009, 2:53 PM UTC

dazzawazza wrote: post #24

sachinag wrote: post #7

In the UK, postcodes - unlike US ZIP codes, they're not free Retail product data - books, movies, music, games, electronics, etc: you can kinda do this through affiliate programs, but it's not great Drug companies - studies can be killed if the data looks bad; we should be able to see every study, completed or not, and all the associated data so we can do comparative analyses

An open UPC/EAN database would be great. Currently you are forced to use Amazon but are restricted to their TOS (no mobile apps being a big thing) or the UPCDatabase which is VERY small (but a valiant effort). The sad thing is that I can see no commercial reason NOT to open the database. People already pay a small fee for obtaining a legitimate EAN/UPC code.