[Data-modeling] Products with ingredients

[Jeff Prucher]

Thanks for your input, everyone!  I'm taking the approach suggested here by Faye (and a bunch of other people), and I like the idea of adding a phylogeny pattern to the Ingredient type. Any suggestions for what the parent/child property names should be?

I don't have a good solution to the ordering problem of ingredients-within-ingredients, but unless we insert a CVT and ask people to explicitly enter the ingredient order, I don't know how much we should rely on the index values, even if the client didn't have a bug with the indexing.  (Actually, an explicit order property would work if we asked users to enter 1, 2, 3, 3a, 3b, 3c, 4, etc. for ingredients within ingredients.)

Jeff


----- "Faye Harris" <faye at metaweb.com> wrote:

> From: "Faye Harris" <faye at metaweb.com>
> To: "Freebase data modeling mailing list" <data-modeling at freebase.com>
> Sent: Tuesday, June 16, 2009 4:04:31 PM GMT -08:00 US/Canada Pacific
> Subject: Re: [Data-modeling] Products with ingredients
>
> 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
> _______________________________________________
> Data-modeling mailing list
> Data-modeling at freebase.com
> http://lists.freebase.com/mailman/listinfo/data-modeling