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Open Food Facts – A free food products database

world.openfoodfacts.org

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Re: Open Food Facts – A free food products database

#81

Post by kw71 »

Hi teolemon, if you're still following:

Please consider allowing multiple barcodes for an individual product. I live in the USA, where (because of tradition and archaic technology) some grocers don't like to market products bearing only EAN barcodes. So, many imported items have both UPC and EAN barcode.

I hit a different case today: a box of 20 pieces with one barcode, but the individual item inside has a different barcode.

Maybe the functionality is already there, but I couldn't figure out how to do this.

Re: Open Food Facts – A free food products database

#82

Post by ashwinpp »

As the comments point out, apart from immediate use to consumers, it can also help understand underlying temporal trends and perhaps with some data analysis suggest healthier substitutes based on user tastes.

However, as part of a course project in using Convolutional nets for image recognition, I was wondering, what if, we could simply take a picture of a rack in a grocery store and augment the image with the overall "healthiness" heatmap.

And now to the meat of the problem, data. Is there a readily available dataset on which the image recognition can be trained? Note that each product will need to have a images taken from a variety of angles and lighting conditions. There exist methods to automatically generate alternate sets of images, but they are not perfect and we would still need data.

Re: Open Food Facts – A free food products database

#85

Post by sandGorgon »

simonecasc wrote: post #20
cl42 wrote: post #8

This is fantastic. One "future vision" if I may -- actually tracking, sharing, recommending, etc. nutrition research. I think one of the most painful things for everyone interested in nutrition is actually knowing what the research says about what they need to eat, when, how, etc. "Future vision squared" would be to personalize nutrition recommendations / advice to each person, but I'm dreaming.

for nutrition research I think http://examine.com is a pretty good resource

actually, this was what I wanted to mention as well. Examine has all the right talent in nutrition.... openfoodfacts has the technical talent.

you guys should find a way to collaborate ... or even power the next gen Examine

Re: Open Food Facts – A free food products database

#86

Post by teolemon »

kw71 wrote: post #81

Hi teolemon, if you're still following: Please consider allowing multiple barcodes for an individual product. I live in the USA, where (because of tradition and archaic technology) some grocers don't like to market products bearing only EAN barcodes. So, many imported items have both UPC and EAN barcode. I hit a different case today: a box of 20 pieces with one barcode, but the individual item inside has a different…

Can you send a mail to pierre@openfoodfacts.org so that I can invite you to the OpenFoodFacts slack. Barcodes are indeed a tedious issue.

Re: Open Food Facts – A free food products database

#87

Post by teolemon »

ashwinpp wrote: post #82

As the comments point out, apart from immediate use to consumers, it can also help understand underlying temporal trends and perhaps with some data analysis suggest healthier substitutes based on user tastes. However, as part of a course project in using Convolutional nets for image recognition, I was wondering, what if, we could simply take a picture of a rack in a grocery store and augment the image with the overal…

Yes, we have a tagged dataset, and image recognition would just be awesome. Can you send a mail to pierre@openfoodfacts.org so that I can invite you to the OpenFoodFacts slack, so that we can discuss it further ?

Re: Open Food Facts – A free food products database

#88

Post by teolemon »

ioddly wrote: post #44

First: looks great, well done. The problem with other food databases I've seen is the amount of duplicate or incorrect information. Are y'all actively taking steps to curtail this?

Yes: so far we have a revision history for each product, and a revert system, we use the photos to ensure accuracy of data and we rely on the Barcode to limit duplication. If you're interested in helping on quality, please send me your email to pierre at openfoodfacts dot org so that I can invite you to our Slack.

Re: Open Food Facts – A free food products database

#89

Post by teolemon »

israrkhan wrote: post #77

It would be nice if this database can also include halal, kosher, or vegetarian/vegan status for the products.

We have a system of labels (for halal, kosher, vegetarian/vegan) which you can see at: http://en.wiki.openfoodfacts.org/Global_labels_taxonomy We're also looking at religious certification authorities. We need help to improve on both.

Re: Open Food Facts – A free food products database

#90

Post by hpoom »

teolemon wrote: post #16
codereflection wrote: post #14

I love this idea. I have wanted to build something similar for a long time. One of the key features I believe would be to track ingredient changes over time, per product. I put a great amount of effort into purchasing products without specific ingredients for the allergy concerns of my family. One of those is High Fructose Corn Syrup. I had finally found a brand of BBQ sauce that was HFCS free, and used it for quite…

We're actually looking for both technical and non technical contributors, on a wide range of topics. We have a Wiki ( http://en.wiki.openfoodfacts.org ) Slack ( http://openfoodfacts.slack.com ) and the source code is available on GitHub.

Is the data available via a RESTful JSON API? If not is that something that would be possible, more than willing to help.

The data would be very useful to mobile apps and mashups if presented in an API.

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