Divers become expert fish spotters, helping compile a database of species for the foundation, which is then used for scientific papers and research.

BBC: Underwater volunteer vacations

Popkin and his team will use the database to evaluate whether the foundation's members have met their pledge, they will also go deeper, seeking to correct for the economic climate and trends among other food makers.

WSJ: Smaller Size? No Thanks to This Pledge

In fact, the New America Foundation where I work has maintained a public database of these attacks since early 2010.

CNN: Are 'Swift Boat' attacks on Obama bogus?

The paper is based on data from Medicare beneficiaries included in an American College of Cardiology Foundation registry of patients who got angioplasty and stent procedures and in another database on bypass surgery maintained by the Society of Thoracic Surgeons.

WSJ: Heart Bypass Surgery May Offer Lower Death Risk Than Angioplasty

The Bank of Social Technologies (BTS in Portuguese) is a database that includes over 600 technologies certified under the Banco do Brasil Foundation Award for Social Technology, since its first edition in 2001.

UNESCO: ABC, Banco do Brasil Foundation and UNESCO sign South-South cooperation for social technologies | United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization

Meanwhile, the Electronic Frontier Foundation is already raising concerns about innocent civilians being mixed up or included in the database.

ENGADGET: FBI to roll out $1 billion public facial recognition system in 2014, will be on to your evildoing everywhere