Are there any open datasets with technical specifications for photographic equipment?

Question

I want to set up a free service where photographers buying or searching for discontinued photographic equipment can reference for technical specifications. For instance, most eBay-listings of second-hand equipment are without any tech. specs whatsoever. My current plan is to do this for the mainstream, usable cameras, lenses and flash units - i.e. not collectibles.

Information about current equipment is usually available from the manufacturer's websites, and some manufacturers (e.g. Canon Camera Museum) also make information about older models available on-line. I am aware of a few non-manufacturer resources such as Botzilla for strobe trigger voltages, and Butkus for old manuals (which contains technical specifications).

By "technical specifications", I refer to things such as focal length and maximum f-stop (for lenses) and (normalized) guide number and trigger voltage (for flash units).

All the sites mentioned above as examples requires scraping to extract the data.

I am hunting for other non-manufacturer resources for technical specifications for photographic equipment to add to the planned service. I am of course most interested in quality open linked data that does not require scraping or other ad-hoc data extraction methods. However, since I suspect that few or no such resources exist, I am interested in pointers to anything useful.

Answer 1

I think it's semi-abandoned, but there are various levels of details for 1,300 models here: https://www.freebase.com/digicams/digital_camera?instances

If nothing else, the schema might provide a starting point for informing the types of information to collect.

Answer 2

Flickr might be an interesting source, though you'd need to scrape it too, probably starting off at http://www.flickr.com/cameras/. The specs are limited to a few key features, but you should find a lot of models there.