[okfn-labs] Product Open Data(base) (POD) - Introduction and Request for Collaborators

[Philippe Plagnol]

Dear Open Knowledge Foundation Labs members,

I’m writing to introduce the Product Open Data effort I’ve been working on
and to ask for help.

Since November 2012, I developed a product database called POD (Product
Open Data) which you can find online at: http://www.product-open-data.com/

This project is quite ambitious: we aim to create the first open database
containing all products in the world which have a barcode (called GTIN
code)! I think this is one of the most interesting open data projects one
can do - product data is everywhere and having good open product data can
support a huge amount of innovation from tools to analyse nutrition,
allergy risks global supply chains as well as allowing us to build app to
turn your smartphone into a barcode scanner!

I’m pleased to say that the database and website are now coming to live
here at the Open Knowledge Foundation Labs. So far I did everything by
myself using php and mysql and I’m not an expert (I taught myself over the
last year!), so I definitely need help and it may be the case that we need
to do some reworking of what is there ;-)

Much of the current code is now on github:
https://github.com/okfn/products(explorer)

The database and pictures are available for download here:
http://www.product-open-data.com/download/

So I’m looking for people interested in collaborating to build the best
open product database in the world :-) The kind of things we would be
working on are:


   -

   Scraping product information
   -

   Cleaning up and normalizing data
   -

   Improving and updating the frontend
   -

   User interface for visualization and editing of data


If you are interested please sign up at
http://pad.okfn.org/p/openproductsor email me directly.

Regards,

Philippe
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