Draft:Open Icecat

Open Icecat is a free catalog of product descriptions. The ultimate goal of the project is to create a worldwide free catalog of products. The end users of the resource are distributors, resellers, retailers, web services for product selection and price comparison, as well as manufacturing resource planning systems of product manufacturers around the world.

Open Icecat should not be confused with non-free commercial directories, including Full Icecat by Icecat Inc, GfK/Etilize, or CNET.

Vendors who use Open Icecat include Cartamundi, Toys "R" Us UK, and VTech.

Development history
The Open Icecat project was launched in 2005 on the initiative of Martijn J Hoogeveen at the Open University of the Netherlands, with the support of 20 IT manufacturers, including Hewlett-Packard, Toshiba, Fujitsu, IBM, and Lenovo. In 2007, Sony, Philips, and Kodak joined the project. , more than 250 manufacturers cooperate with Open Icecat. The catalog provides product descriptions in more than 33 languages, including English, German, Russian, French, Spanish, Chinese, Japanese, Portuguese, Dutch etc.

Integration
The original product descriptions are available for free download in XML and URL formats. Open Icecat can be integrated with the open e-commerce platforms Batavi (software), Magento, OsCommerce, PrestaShop, and ZenCart.

Supported standards

 * GTIN including European Article Number and Universal Product Code
 * UNSPSC for categorization
 * XML including open DTD and XSD catalogs
 * HTML for the ASP/URL version of the directory
 * UTF-8
 * ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 country codes
 * ISO 639-1 language codes