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Some of my online projects:
Edit
Some possible points of interest to barcode wikians in cypherspace:Edit
- introduction to barcode symbologies
- supermarket enslavement secrets
- grocery store revenge
- barcode battler.
KudosEdit
Barcode wikia is a dogsend! Kudos to _____ for creating it! Barcode wikia provides several services which I have been advocating for several years now.
- It provides a namespace which seems to accommodate UPC and EAN
barcodes.
- It may be amenable to XML markup, and with enough participants,
large databases of foodstuffs and other consumer goodies. This is especially convenient in the event that wikia offers "tarball" downloads as does Wikipedia. Does it?
SuggestionsEdit
It seems barcode wiki could be improved in several ways with no real "technical" intervention and plausibly without pushing the fair use envelope.
- The USDA weblishes what it calls the Nutrient Database for Standard
Reference. Tens of thousands of mostly generically defined foodstuffs are keyed by what they call an NDB number. Since the relationship between barcodes and NDB's is many-to-one, referencing Barcode############[#] wikipages to NDB's would be as simple for barcode wikia content providers as looking up an NDB and inserting it as a wikilink. This, of course, would mean wikinames in the form NDB#### would also be allowed in the barcode wikia, making it somewhat less simple than at present. Nevertheless, I think the world really needs (market transparency demands) there to be a machine-readable and public-domain mapping between EAN/UPC and NDB. Also, in case barcode wikia is to include ingredient lists, many food ingredients have been assigned NDB numbers.
- What about PLU codes? These are four-digit numbers generically
identified with consumer commodities of the fresh produce kind. I've been collecting PLU stickers like some people collect postage stamps. I believe the entire PLU system is online and downloadable in bulk, but I'm not sure. It may be proprietary. UPC appears to be, with the UPC database mentioned in barcode's Main Page being a contactee. Hopefully fair use, specifically a broad interpretation thereof, will prevail.
- The activities of barcode wikia might be better served
given additional online resources and software resources:
- A telnet server hosting an SQL client, assuming the number of
barcodes noted gets largish. Telnet and SQL are both powerful antidotes to webstacles, which is to say the watering down of signal-to-noise ratio using CGI scripting.
- An ftp site for both upload and download for barcode (and perhaps
NDB) coded files in nonproprietary formats such as CSV, XML; and TGZ compressions thereof.
- A file sharing network for helping multiple facilities such as
described above to keep 'up to date.'
At some point, barcode wikia may have to deal with the problem of disinformation in some form.