This is cool: An open data standard for food — Tech News and Analysis

abernard102@gmail.com 2012-08-20

Summary:

“An open data standard for food has emerged on the web. With such a tool, restaurants, food apps, grocery stores, the government and other interested parties can tell that arugula is also called rocket salad, no matter where on the web it occurs or what a restaurant menu or recipe app calls it. Right now, that’s an impossible task, which leads to inefficiencies in both consumer-facing apps and the supply chains of restaurants and grocery stores. A group of folks concerned about sustainable foods have built the seeds of an open food database hosted on Heroku, with the code pertaining to it located at Github. The group, which gave an awesome panel at South by Southwest in Austin, consisted of a restaurateurchef, someone from an urban gardening movement, someone from Code for America and someone who rates sustainable restaurants. So far, they have created a database of 1,000 foods and hope to have 7,000 that folks can access via an API... the Open Food folks have sidestepped the issue of processed foods by only including whole foods in their database. But to make such a database useful for a wide variety of people and purposes, I think things like Coke or Twinkies will have to be included. For example, the power of Open Food data extends beyond food apps to calorie-counting apps or even budgeting apps...”

Link:

http://gigaom.com/2012/03/14/this-is-cool-an-open-data-standard-for-food/

Updated:

08/16/2012, 06:08

From feeds:

Open Access Tracking Project (OATP) » abernard102@gmail.com

Tags:

oa.new oa.data oa.comment oa.crowd oa.tools oa.floss oa.github oa.food oa.apps

Authors:

abernard

Date tagged:

08/20/2012, 18:54

Date published:

03/15/2012, 23:16