[Data-modeling] Products with ingredients

[Faye Harris]

Yay! Glad to see this making it to the data modeling mailing list since 
our discussions.
> There are two things I'm seeing with my example data that don't quite work in the model, though, and I'm not quite sure what the best way to resolve them is. One is the Corn Flakes ingredient "Milled corn". Should the Ingredient topic be "Milled Corn", should it just be "Corn", or do we need a CVT to allow people to modify the ingredient ("Corn", "milled")?  
I'd be inclined to make "milled corn" a stand-alone topic. My main 
concerns regarding data like this are searchability and reusability. 
Users need to be able to link all products containing "milled corn" to 
the ingredient, and searching by that ingredient should turn up all of 
the products that use it. Secondly, in cooking and in chemistry, the 
process by which a base ingredient is enhanced or modified is usually 
considered part of its identification and not, I feel, a CVT-level 
annotator. A recipe that calls for preserved plums cannot be duplicated 
with fresh plums, and for a consumer, fermented tofu becomes an acquired 
taste whereas regular tofu is widely accepted. Those, for the purpose of 
identification and labeling, constitute completely different ingredients 
and should be modeled as such.
> The toothpaste has this ingredient also: "sodium lauryl sulfate (from coconut oil)", which I think is the same issue.
>   
SLS can be derived from coconut oil or palm kernel oil. I'm not sure if 
either could possibly be less of a skin irritant. Most products (I'd say 
90+%?), however, don't specify from which their SLS is derived. The KISS 
method here would then produce three distinct topics: SLS, SLS (from 
coconut oil), and SLS (from palm kernel oil). But then wouldn't most 
topics link to the (unannotated) SLS? Almost seems like a hierarchy is 
needed to set up a parent-children relationship between SLS and its two 
(slight) variations.
> The other one is ingredients within ingredients: the toothpaste tube lists this ingredient: "fruit extracts (strawberry, banana, and other natural flavors)". Treat as four separate ingredients, and punt on the relationship?
+1 on treating as separate ingredients here.

-- Faye