Open ICEcat
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Open ICEcat is an Open Content project under the Open Content License in which an open catalogue is created for product information. Editors are participating manufacturers. The users of the product content are distributors, resellers, retailers, comparison websites or online shopping directories, enterprise resource planning systems or the manufacturers themselves.
Open ICEcat began formally in December 2005 with 20 participating IT manufacturers. Among the earliest contributors are Hewlett-Packard, Toshiba, Fujitsu-Siemens, IBM and Lenovo. As of October 2006, this number has grown to 51 manufacturers, including participants from consumer electronics and the telecom industry. On the user side, similar growth has been seen.
Open ICEcat is interesting because it demonstrates that the Open Content concept is not only relevant for public domain projects like Wikipedia, but also for commerce-related projects. This is analogous to the move of open source applications like Apache, Linux and MySQL into the world of commerce, which marked an increased professional acceptance level.
[edit] Supported standards
- GTIN, including former European Article Number and Universal Product Code
- UNSPSC
- XML, including an open catalogue DTD
- HTML
