Waiting For A Common Place Name Database

I want to have a reliable way to reference online anything that I can see in real life. I want every person, place, and thing to have a distinct reference on the Web.

Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, is a leader in this– he can explain the need for linked data better than I could, so I'll just focus on what I want.

I want a central service to which I can tell something about an entity (company, service, person, etc.) and have it logged somewhere. And I want this aggregated in a reliable place where everyone can see, reference, and do things with that list.

What I want right now is a public database of places. Every restaurant, store, school, park, museum, beach, statue. Every place should have a place in a magical Place Name Database. Lots of companies are building their own, and the commercial need for such a thing is well-established. But setting standards among established companies ain't easy.

But once we have this, we can start saying things– and learning things– in automated ways about a place, and communicate directly with a place in an authoritative fashion.

When a restaurant is inspected, and the result is published on EveryBlock, why can't we automatically notify the restaurant like this:

Way to go @michaelminasf MICHAEL MINA RESTAURANT http://t.co/wrW5Na5 for your 100 score on Monday's restaurant inspection

A person has a good experience at a store, and it is added to the public record about that place directly from Yelp, with a link back to the Yelp review. A taxi runs into a pole, and my photo of that incident is logged, with a link to my image. Right now this content is completely balkanized (no offense to my Balkan friends).

I think we'll look back decades from now and see our current place discovery methods as brutish and dumb. We can do so much more with existing databases, mobile devices w/ GPS, and our own energy. It's time to move beyond the check-in.


Posted

in

,

by

Tags: