[Data-modeling] Products with ingredients

[Jeff Prucher]

----- "Kurt Bollacker" <kurt at spaceship.com> wrote:

> From: "Kurt Bollacker" <kurt at spaceship.com>
> To: "Freebase data modeling mailing list" <data-modeling at freebase.com>
> Sent: Tuesday, June 16, 2009 3:47:02 PM GMT -08:00 US/Canada Pacific
> Subject: Re: [Data-modeling] Products with ingredients
>
> On Tue, Jun 16, 2009 at 03:29:44PM -0700, Robert Cook wrote:
> > > 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? I'm tempted toward this one -- if you're
>  
> > > looking for potential allergens, or animal-based ingredients, or
> the  
> > > like, you don't care whether the offending item is in a main  
> > > ingredient or is an ingredient of an ingredient.
> > 
> > This is probably a good guideline - if there are sub-ingredients,
> they  
> > should probably be broken out when the data is added.  The only  
> > problem here is that ordering matters -- on the original contents  
> > list, there is more of item N than item N+1 in the product.  If you 
> 
> > break them out, it's unclear where they should end up in the list.
> 
> This is exactly the same problem that Kirrily has to solve with her
> Recipe schema.  It seems like the ingredient type should work for
> both
> products and recipies.  It also seems like recipies have the same
> containment tree pattern.  A cherry pie has a "double butter crust"
> as
> an ingredient, but this is a recipe as well.  So products should be
> able to contain other products as ingredients.  For example, there is
> a Ritter chocolate bar that contains corn flakes as an ingedient.

Many topics will be typed as both /food/ingredient and /business/product_ingredient, but I think they should exist as cotypes, rather than being the same type. (I really don't want to know what recipes you have that use 1,1,1-trichloroethane, for example, although it's used in a lot of non-food products.)  But there's nothing stopping you from including /en/corn_flakes as an ingredient of the Ritter bar -- it's just a topic like any other.

Jeff