About Posted on December 25th, 2008
What? – The idea / mission
ProductTransparency aims to improve the relationship between consumers and producers by making (food) product ingredient lists public, distributable, machine readable and by doing so – searchable.
For this we need:
- The concept
- The implementation of examples
- The promotion of the idea
Why? – The advantages
For the consumers:
- You know the ingredients of the product that you are consuming and maybe be even the producer of the ingredients. This gives you the needed basis for thoughtful and strategic consumption.
- You can efficiently search for products you want. This becomes handy especially if you have special needs. Examples
- You are allergic to peanuts and are looking for cereals.
- You are looking for sweets with ingredients made by organic farming and would like to avoid cacao.
For the producers
- If your customers see that you are confident about the quality of your products to make the ingredients, sources and production transparent you earn their trust.
- People can find the products they want and that might be yours.
- You don’t have to offer these search tools yourself but only have to make the data public.
Find here a little comparison to other similar projects and the reason why we think ProductTransparency is needed.
How? – The technological background
ProductTransparency uses semantic web technologies to store and process the data. This data is published under the Creative Commons Attribution License. The software that will be implemented during the project will be published under an open source license (preferably the ISC license).
When? – The status of the project
Currently we are in the conceptual phase. In the end we would like to have some basic implementations and examples to show.
Who – People involved
Hopefully YOU! ProductTransparency is an community project so everybody can use it and contribute to it. Please follow the blog to stay tuned! This open, non-commercial project is mainly driven by Konrad Förstner and Tim Heckhausen.
Contact
Send a mail to contact AT producttransparency DOT org or join us on twitter or identi.ca.
