Interesting organisations

==International Institutions== (These are the ones most likely used for Reference of Core-data)

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United Nations Economic Commission for Europe (UNECE) - Environment and Human Settlements, Transport, Statistics, Economic Analysis, Population Analysis, Industrial Restructuring, Energy and Enterprise Development, Trade, Industry and Enterprise Development, Timber, Agricultural Standards, Coordinating Unit for Operational Activities, Transport, Health and Environment Pan-European Programme. 10 pages of different types of Apples, need I say more. Reference-quality stuff. See also UNECE

UN/LOCODE by UNECE UN/LOCODE provides code elements for more than 36.000 names of ports, airports, rail and road terminals, postal exchange offices, border crossing points and other locations used in trade and transport in 234 countries.

+ gateway into all ISO 3166-1 (country codes) and some ISO 3166-2 (subdivision codes)

United Nations Centre for Trade Facilitation and Electronic Business - Tons and Tons of specifications/advisories. Refenrence-quality stuff. A must see!!

International Organization for Standardization - They have a bad practice of charging lots of money for any reference-quality data. - See ISO for more info on ISO and Consumerium

Foundations

http://act.greenpeace.org - Greenpeace cyber-activist community weblog, has hundreds of thousands of users, searches on almost any topic will yield something (Google searches will only show official documents). Active discussion of features for activist sites, how to integrate email chat and web, whether to use wikis or annotation, etc.. Active discussion of many different projects, e.g. a DNS reserving the names of all ecoregions. (warning: contains violent minds, who clearly haven't heard of w:RDF)

http://amnesty.org - Amnesty International site, almost as good, but less focused on email campaigns