Ok but how are you going to do that?
Tommy

There's an old adage that holds "data is not information is not knowledge". That is, data alone is not informative, and information alone does not create knowledge. What you need is context at each step. If all you're doing is collecting data, there is very little value beyond trivia. To add value, you need to organize the data in a context where people can use it to create information and knowledge.

Great strides are being made in data visualization and analytical processing tools. If you can find ways to apply those tools to the data appearing on the internet, then you have a great business. For instance, there are lots of companies based solely on slicing and dicing web server log data into more usable information about hits and visits.

Do you have a particular analytical interest, or are you just interested in collecting the raw data?

didnt get this... make this simple..how would it makes money? which you put in the pitch but was left hanging....

ohh i almost had a daytime nightmare of aniMATRIX for this!

idea needs more work.

I would propose instead a different shade of this; a "googelish" number-search, which would include formulas, data-sheets and other important imformation in one easy searchable, linkable way.

I imagine a google-text-search box and some tick-box option under that divide the search into;

"all | datasheets | forumlas | weather | records | history | etc.."

There are lots of times I'm whipping up some search to try to find datasheets, formulas etc. and it's often frustrating when it's written in taiwanese or inside a professors 21 page musings..

After making it the number one search for numbers on the web, you know google are going to "gooble" you up...

Best
Torgrot

Perhaps you could allow other sites to reference specific numbers on yours (which would of course require an intelligently-designed indexing system) in such a way that they are automatically kept up-to-date as your master database is updated? Sort of like sites that serve automatically-updating exchange rates, stock prices, etc. They could then be charged for the privilege.

The challenge will be working out what numbers to include, where to get the data (and how to ensure your sources are reliable), how to update them, whether to make your sources available to the referring sites (essential to anyone who relies on the accuracy of the information)...

extending on torgrot's "googelish" number search idea. How about a service to allow contextual SQL-like queries on the data
e.g.
"SELECT Country, RainfallPerMonth WHERE Year = "2006" AND Country IS IN "Europe" ORDER BY Month"