[Data-modeling] Products with ingredients

[Robert Cook]

On Jun 16, 2009, at 4:37 PM, Jeff Prucher wrote:

> 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?

It could be a "a kind of" / "is a generalization of" classic  
phylogeny.  For example:

- Milled corn is "a kind of" corn
- Corn "is a generalization of" milled corn.

Perhaps there is something more elegant and domain specific, but my  
addled mind couldn't conjure that.

> 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.)

Index values really are semantically relevant (see Film performances,  
for example, where billing order is a major contractual obligation).   
Also, I think hand numbered system would lead to madness.  And the  
client can and should be fixed as well.

One solution here could be to add a property to the ingredient type,  
"Contains ingredients", which allows one to store these sub- 
ingredients when appropriate.  This makes the simple case of data  
entry straightforward (enter what you see on the package into the  
product type), while ultimately supporting the allergy use case you  
mentioned.  And, for the allergy use case, you could add an additional  
property to ingredient to the specific allergy it causes.

That way, nobody is forced to break these things out during data  
entry, and it doesn't break the "order by ingredient amount" semantics  
on the product.

So, I'm proposing two phylogenies.  The world craves hierarchy.  Sorry  
anarchists.

R



> 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
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