Ask HN: Opportunities for Structured Data?

[aidscholar]

Ever since Google acquired ITA and Metaweb, I've been thinking of other verticals where building / aggregating structured data would be valuable. Seems like many niches have already been covered:

- Lawyers: Avvo

- Doctors: Vitals

- Location: Yelp/Foursquare/etc

- Cars: Vast

- Pets: Vast

- Movies: Imdb

- Credit Cards: NerdWallet

I think it would be interesting to brainstorm some other verticals where building your own structured data could be a viable business.

Here are some that I'm thinking about:

- Colleges: It's a pain comparing which college is better vs another. Having a single structured database/model for all colleges would be great. Could extend it to comparing courses/costs/future salaries/etc.

- Disease: There are some companies already doing this, but I feel like it could be more open. Symptoms, cures, timelines, progression, location, etc.

- Soft Goods: Clothes, accessories, etc. Not sure how you'd go about creating / gathering enough structured data, but seems like there is a need.

What do you think are some good opportunities to apply the structured data biz model?

[smiler]

Household appliances - no site I know of allows you to search them based on the width, height and depth but for people who are replacing them, then that is often the first consideration - yes there are 'standard' sizes but how many houses are built to standard :) Another thing of course is when buying an oven or fridge, important consideration is capacity. I would love to be able to search for say 'show me all fridges which have a max width of 90cm and order them by capacity'. Add In price comparison and links to buy

[stoney]

In the UK several of the national newspapers publish university league tables - not sure if you get the same thing in the US? Might provide some inspiration for you.

See http://extras.timesonline.co.uk/stug/universityguide.php for an example.

[sabj]

Colleges breaks down when trying to turn qualitative experiences into quantitative data, I don't like how the models come out. (Doesn't mean they don't end up successful, obviously.)

My fave approach in the space recently has been Unigo.com, nice aggregation of user generated content to great effect.

[aidscholar]

It's hard even to measure the quantitative stuff now. For example, how do you perform a query like "find me 10 colleges in the west coast, that offer both a CS bachelors degree and masters, ordered by average entry SAT score"?

[ww520]

- Books, book categories, book reviews.

- Wines, beers.

- Food ingredients and nutrition (FDA data).

- Public and private companies, financial data and reports.

- Housing data, county records.

[joshu]

This is a good line of thinking.

Disease (health) is a huge, huge industry.

(does Vast really do pets?)

More ideas: Travel, Financial Instruments (credit cards and other debt)

[aidscholar]

Yeah - Vast really does pets. http://www.vast.com/pets

Do you really think there's still an opportunity in Travel given ITA/Google?

[BonoboBoner]

Although I dont like the word, I d say "semantic" endpoints for things like YQL to enable easy access to data without having to parse html manually.

[smiler]

I'll add another. Hotel, car rental, flight reward programs and their myriad of benefits, special offers to get extra points / miles etc.

[petervandijck]

I like the colleges one. Good question too, giving it some thought...

[sshah]

household grocery consumption for a zip code/town/neighborhood (or is there something out there already).

Would be interesting for consumers, manufacturers and stores.