Created by Synthesis Studios, holmz is an experiment in open databases. We've designed it from the bottom up to distribute published information alongside user-contributed and sensor data. We're doing some pretty novel stuff under the hood to make it a place for people (and things!) to store, distribute, discover, and manipulate knowledge.

We're still at a really early stage in this experiment, but we're moving along really fast. Register, and join us for the ride.

We absolutely love both Wikipedia and Freebase, and holmz draws from both of them as inspiration. While Wikipedia has an amazing collection of knowledge, it's unstructured and we know from experience that it's incredibly difficult to use it as a programmatic data source. Freebase, on the other hand, is structured -- but we wanted to try to push the boundaries a bit further. We incorporated notions of summarization, aggregation, type conversions as well as designing in facilities to make it easy for people to contribute knowledge without going through holmz's learning curve.

Soon! We're granting anybody who wants it a "read-only" account to the system so that we can all get on the same page. We're going to quickly start to roll out permissions to users so that they can create objects, edit objects, etc. We're all looking forward to that day.

That should be evident pretty soon! Let's just say, we're launching another site in about a month to be powered by holmz and its name is very Sir Arthur Conan Doyle-ish.

Just drop us a note at us@holmz.org! Please don't hesistate whether it's something you really like or something you absolutely hate. We love chatting.

If, on the other hand, electronically mediated communication isn't for you, then you can find us in Cambridge, MA, USA either suffering through the cold, or roasting through the heat.