There is now tons of data scattered around the world dealing with companies and products. For consumers to be able to move agilely between these datasets, the data needs to be mapped. For example, if you’re researching an HP printer on one website and would like to know what Consumer Reports says about the printer and what socially responsible investors are saying about HP, you would currently need to do separate searches. How much better would it be if you could just move smoothly between shopping sites, research sites, advocacy groups, and anything else with related information? Unfortunately, that’s going to require some integration.

Fortunately, that’s just the task IntoGreater was conceived to accomplish. Originally written to help socially responsive shopping site alonovo.com map together data from Amazon.com and investment research firm KLD, IntoGreater is working its way towards becoming a general use data integration tool.

IntoGreater’s solution is a friendly meeting of machine and human minds. The IntoGreater engine makes guesses about how data sets map together and poses significant matches to users for confirmation. Users simply answer questions, which often turn out to be surprisingly interesting researchables (at least, so far!).

IntoGreater is written in ruby on rails and is being built on top of our wagging software. Grass Commons expects to produce an open source release of an IntoGreater rails engine some time this summer after the beta release of Hooze.org (from which the IntoGreater engine will be extracted). Contact us if you’re interested in getting your hands on some portion of the code before then.