About the next version of Consumer Gadget

A couple of words of what I have been thinking about for the past month or two.

Ethical information is rarely about products. Instead it is about factories, materials, company policies, countries or other geographical areas. It is important for Consumer Gadget to know these "abstract elements" behind the products, so ethical information experts can focus only on their area of expertise, but still grow the Consumer Gadget database.

This sounds simple, but requires that we explain the structure of our world in a language that computers understand. Computers make the connections from barcodes to the abstrat elements, which trigger the actual ethical information. In contrast, Wikipedia is a huge database of interlinked information that is only readable by humans. It propably contains all neccessary information for any ethical shopper, but it does not help Consumer Gadget at all. We need to be able to automatically generate an ethical report, tailored for mobile screens.

Semantics is the important word here. I am at the moment designing a system that can handle multiple levels of computer understandable ontologies. The problem is, that the ontologies must be also human readable, because they are updated by the public, who don't have a degree in information science. What is the best format for both computer and human readable information? I believe the answer is "tags". Every product is a tag, every factory is a tag. If you tag a product tag with a factory tag, it creates a computer understandable connection between a product and a factory, meaning that the product is manufactured in the factory.

Now the biggest problem is the user interface. Tags are easy UI-wise, but because of the semantic meaning between the tags, the freedom of tagging whatever with whatever must be removed. Also, how do we educate the users to see everything as tags, not only concrete products and companies, but abstractions like "manufactured in unknown Nokia factory".