[okfn-discuss] freetable.org: Expressions of interest sought

Tue Dec 22 00:31:43 UTC 2009

Hi,

Some friends and I are embarking on a project called freetable.org.
We aim to create a public commons for shared data in much the same way
Wikipedia created a public commons for textual data.  That is, we seek
to be a centralized real time repository for shared data.  Some
examples of the broad range of data we are considering:

    - classified, realty, job, and personal ads

    - customer reviews of products and businesses

    - app data for open source applications

    - geographic, scientific, and economic data

Data will be able to be contributed by anyone, or at least initially,
by any programmer, under an open license.  Data will be in the
standard table, record, field format.  An interface similar to SQL
will be provided for programmers to access the data.  Permissions will
be used to control who can modify the data.

Rather than trying to carefully design the database tables we are
going to support, we will allow programmers to create any database
table on our system, and then see which tables prove popular.

The purpose of this email is to gauge interest in freetable.org.  We
don't want to build something that isn't useful to people.

So if you have or know of an open dataset that you would like to make
use of via freetable, could you please reply letting us know what that
dataset is.

many thanks,
gordon