The data will be useful to the Open Notebook Science solubility project, and because Alfa has agreed to Open Data access, it can be useful far beyond that. In return, the Open Notebook folks cleaned up Alfa’s data, putting it into a clean database format, providing unique IDs (ChemSpiderIDs), and linking back to the Alfa Aesar catalog page.

Open Notebook then merged the cleaned-up data set with several others. The result was a set of 13,436 Open Data melting point values.

They then created a Web tool for exploring the merged dataset.

Why stop with melting points? Why stop with chemistry? Open data for, say, books could lead readers to libraries, publishers, bookstores, courses, other readers…

They now have a contest, with $45K in prizes, to encourage the development of apps that make use of that data via its APIs. Here’s more about the data:

The World Bank Indicators API lets you programmatically access more than 3,000 indicators and query the data in several ways, using parameters to specify your request. Many data series date back 50 years, and can be used to create interesting applications. You can read more about the data itself in the API Sources section. The projects API provides access to all World Bank projects, including closed projects, active projects, and those in the pipeline. The dataset includes pilot geocode data on project locations; note that these data are collected through a desk study of existing project documents and are being released as a test database — further work is required for data validation and quality enhancements…

Releasing all this data must have required a lot of cultural transformation work. Wow.