[Data-modeling] Products with ingredients

Fri Jun 19 18:25:06 UTC 2009

Sorry, Paul -- I overlooked this amidst all the other responses.

Certainly, the "product with ingredients" type is meant for any kind of product that has ingredients, not just food.

Your other suggestions are interesting, and would maybe need to go on another type. (Or on the existing Consumer Product type itself?) In the short term, I'd like to get the Product with Ingredients type up, but additional properties can always be added.

In terms of specifics, Manufacturing Process is an interesting idea; someone (Sprocket? Spencer?) has done some work with modeling processes already. I don't know much about the subject, but it might be an interesting model.  Location is a bit trickier, since many products are produced in many locations (I guess this can mean two things -- a product that comprises parts from more than once manufacturer, and multiple manufacturing plants that produce the same product).* I suppose making the property non-unique would serve, although you wouldn't necessarily know which kind of multiple-location product you were getting. 

Recycling might be trickier, since what's recyclable varies hugely from region to region and time to time. 

Faye suggested off-line that a Certification property might be useful (things like "organic", various "green" certifications -- we could have a greenwashing base!, UL, etc.) Again, some of these might vary from manufacturing plant to manufacturing plant (Coke is only certified as kosher in some markets, for example).

Jeff

*Product With Ingredients already points out the fact that we'll need multiple topics for some products, like Coke**, where the ingredients vary from location to location.

**No, I don't know why I'm obsessed with Coke today. I don't even drink it!

----- "Paul Mackay" <pauljmackay at gmail.com> wrote:

> From: "Paul Mackay" <pauljmackay at gmail.com>
> To: "Freebase data modeling mailing list" <data-modeling at freebase.com>
> Sent: Tuesday, June 16, 2009 5:02:03 PM GMT -08:00 US/Canada Pacific
> Subject: Re: [Data-modeling] Products with ingredients
>
> I'd like to ask if it might be worth considering this a little
> differently. What about a "Detailed product" schema that could include
> ingredients (more aimed at all products not just food) but also other
> factors as well? Things like manufacturing process, location,
> recycling information, etc. Or is that too much in one schema? Also
> labeling information could be useful, but perhaps that belongs in a
> "Labeled product" schema.
> 
> I'm basing this comment mostly on the ideas presented here
> http://www.worldchanging.com/archives/007256.html . Also the "embodied
> energy" information being stored in WattzOn here (
> http://www.wattzon.com/stuff ) could potentially be pulled in.
> 
> paul
> 
> 
> On Tue, Jun 16, 2009 at 4:37 PM, Jeff Prucher < jeff at metaweb.com >
> 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?
> 
> 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
> > _______________________________________________
> 
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