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

Re:Ask HN: What company/industry would you like to see open ... by sachinag on Thursday October 08, 2009 @03:09AM (#868522)
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

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Re:Ask HN: What company/industry would you like to see open ... by DarkShikari on Thursday October 08, 2009 @04:05AM (#868591)
http://wikileaks.org/wiki/UK_government_database_of_all_1,84...
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Re:Ask HN: What company/industry would you like to see open ... by kierank on Thursday October 08, 2009 @07:51AM (#868805)
This isn't the full postcode database. The full postcode database maps postcodes to actual addresses instead of co-ordinates. You could map these coordinates to addresses but you'd need Ordnance Survey data which you've also got to pay for.
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Re:Ask HN: What company/industry would you like to see open ... by smiler on Thursday October 08, 2009 @04:29AM (#868618)
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

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Re:Ask HN: What company/industry would you like to see open ... by windsurfer on Thursday October 08, 2009 @07:02AM (#868744)
Why isn't it legal to use?

Even if I download and read a book illegally, I'm still allowed to post quotes from the book on my blog. I'm still allowed to know the material. Why is this list any different?

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Re:Ask HN: What company/industry would you like to see open ... by dazzawazza on Thursday October 08, 2009 @06:10AM (#868691)
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.

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Re:Ask HN: What company/industry would you like to see open ... by hypest on Friday October 09, 2009 @10:53AM (#871499)
Not open, but an otherwise "free" and official place to get some info regarding a barcode... http://gepir.gs1.org/V31/xx/gtin.aspx?Lang=en-US
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Re:Ask HN: What company/industry would you like to see open ... by pplante on Thursday October 08, 2009 @04:12AM (#868601)
RE: Drug companies - I imagine that this would be great data to have for the scientific community. But I am sure this would cause many patent issues for the industry...
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