The Internet UPC Database is the first part of our mashup. This site, located at http://www.upcdatabase.com, is an interesting project. This site is a library of Universal Product Codes. Users can enter UPC numbers to see what the product is, and they can contribute to the site by adding UPC numbers and product descriptions. There are commercial vendors that sell this information to people. However, being an open, collaborative project, the Internet UPC Database gives this information away for free. Other sites have arisen to compete with the Database, but I personally like this site because it’s one of, if not the, largest and oldest sites of its kind, the content is explicitly issued under a Creative Commons License (Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5), and most importantly, the site offers a XML-RPC service to interact with its database.
The XML-RPC service is free and open. There is no need to get a developer’s key or authenticate against. The API’s...