Semantic Freecycle
Extract Data from Freecycle ?
Freecycle has nearly 5000 groups, and over 8 million members following the posts.
The posts are via mailing lists ( often yahoo group ), and tend to be very simple - with the title including ( often in the local language ) info about : - giving away or asking - the type of object
in the message, there is more information about the object, about the place, about the availability.
How difficult would it be to extract data from all these emails, in a semantic web approach, having every request “objectified”, and linked to a simple ontology ( a “Freecycle Ontology” )
As there is already a critical mass of millions of users, and growing, with possibly hundreds of millions of transactions, could it be a interesting starting point for creating and making available new vector spaces for alternative economics ?
What is Freecycle ?
"The Freecycle Network™ is made up of 4,915 groups with 8,143,921 members around the world. It's a grassroots and entirely nonprofit movement of people who are giving (and getting) stuff for free in their own towns. It's all about reuse and keeping good stuff out of landfills."
Also see
Map
Map done by Elf Pavlik :