Hooze.org is about helping users gather and share information in ways that will let online shoppers learn what they care to know when they need to know it. It’s designed to help its user community do three things:

1. amass nuggets of consumer wisdom using community research tools that unite the collaborative elegance of wikis with the organizing power of tagging (wagging).
2. map together existing research on products and companies (IntoGreater).
3. find their favorite bits of all this information when it’s most useful by clicking directly from shopping sites big and small.

Nobody gets their organizational systems right the first time — it always has to evolve a bit. So it goes with data.

That’s why we invented Wagn. Wagn is about growing structure organically. By infusing wikis with database power, you can start with a messy heap and end up with a crystalline pyramid; that’s data getting rich.

See what we mean at Wagn.org and Hooze.org — both are built from our open-source Wagn application.

There is now tons of data scattered around the world dealing with companies and products. For consumers to be able to move agilely between these datasets, the data needs to be mapped. For example, if you’re researching an HP printer on one website and would like to know what Consumer Reports says about the printer and what socially responsible investors are saying about HP, you would currently need to do separate searches. How much better would it be if you could just move smoothly between shopping sites, research sites, advocacy groups, and anything else with related information? Unfortunately, that’s going to require some integration.

Fortunately, that’s just the task IntoGreater was conceived to accomplish. Originally written to help socially responsive shopping site alonovo.com map together data from Amazon.com and investment research firm KLD, IntoGreater is working its way towards becoming a general use data integration tool.

Say you want to share music or stories or research openly on the internet but want to set certain conditions to its use. No problem, Creative Commons Licenses are right up your alley.

If you want to share software code in a similar way, the Creative Commons license isn’t so good a fit. With software, you likely have different needs owing to the way in which software code is typically used. Mostly, you’ll want to address the code’s human-readable version, or source, differently from its machine-readable version to make sure folks share your work the way you want them to. But you’re in luck again: there is a wonderful palate of open source licenses available.

Now the poser: what if you want to share structured data — things like databases, spreadsheets, and XML documents? There again, you may have special needs. You may want to make sure that certain things about the way things are sorted or filtered are made clear. For example, if you create a top ten list of best bike saddles, you may want to make sure the list is presented in the original order (or, if not, that the sorting change be noted). You also might want fine grain citations, to make it clear, for example, that you used one source for the saddle specs and another for the field testing data. This example is trivial, but for people to share large datasets (like we want businesses and researchers to do with consumers) this balance of protection and incentive to share could be vital.

Well, as far as we know, no such public license for structured data exists! We’d like to find out tomorrow that there is a license ready to jump into this role, but until we do, we’re thinking we may need to help push for the solution, which we’re now calling FOSSIL (Free & Open Source Structured Information License) We’re currently in a very exploratory phase, emailing law profs, asking questions at parties, etc. If anyone reading this knows someone we should talk to (or parties we should go to), we could definitely use help.