EVDB exemplifies yet another interesting open content platform model

Brian Dear is the creator of EVDB, the Events and Venues Database.  Similar to the way Joshua Schachter decided to put together all the thousands of links he was pooling on his local machine into a public database, Brian decided that he needed a better way to track events and that the public could help him do it.  In an interview posted on IT Conversations, he says the Internet has not done a very good job making events discoverable and that the diverse collections of events such as book authors speaking engagements, art shows, and industry trade shows all appear in different formats on different types of web sites in difficult to reach places. 

Brian's mission with EVDB was "to free events information from the constraints of HTML," to become the Great Events Emancipator.  Crawling the web is very labor-intensive, so EVDB has been looking at ways to leverage pings for discovery instead of trying to build a massive search infrastructure.  Emulating the blog pingserver concept, EVDB is allowing events data providers to register with an email address and a password to use the EVDB API so they can notify the system of new events or even to search the system or add data directly to it.  They support open standard formats for their input and output data such as iCal (Macintosh calendar format), hCal (experimental format that can be integrated into the browser), rss, and tags.

Interestingly, David Weinberger asked the guys on the Folksonomy panel at ETech about what happens when metadata becomes a part of the tagging systems and how that will help clarify the perspective of the person who adds a tag.  For example, it might be interesting to know whether a tag is referring to a concept or a thing.  Does "cardinal" refer to a bird or a baseball team?  Joshua Schachter argued that too much overhead will encumber the toolset and disincentivize people from tagging.  But the answer is probably not simply about finding ways to imply meaning through context.  Yes, an object with a "cardinal" tag that also mentions "giants" is more likely to be about a baseball team, but there have to be some explicit ways of defining order in data without creating too much overhead.

So, Brian's answer to that is basically verticalizing data.  The data in his system is all about events and only about events.  Just as the data in flickr is all about photos.  So, you can start imagining a world where del.icio.us, flickr, evdb and all these open systems with common data formats are connected to create context.  Add similar data from airlines, hotels, and restaurants and you suddenly have a very powerful discovery tool for travelers. 

But the most interesting thing to me is that all the data in these systems is coming from the community, the people who know the data best rather then from big companies pushing down data.  I'm amazed that Amazon is photographing the world to create a street-level competitor to Google Maps.  I actually wouldn't be surprised if they pull it off, but it just seems crazy for a couple of guys in a SUV to try and compete with a satellite system.  Similarly, CNet has hundreds of outsourced staff pumping data about consumer electronics products into their Channel Services system every day.  I'm guessing that between Engadget and Gizmodo and all the other CE enthusiasts in the world that with the right incentive you could get pretty close to the same data and even add more important data, such as what people think of the products.

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