USDA Food Nutrient Database: clutter-free JSON edition

http://ashleyw.co.uk/project/food-nutrient-database

by ashleyw • 15 years ago

7 5 15 years ago

ashleyw.co.uk

Udo3• 15 years ago

Poking around in those datasets is fun. That reminds me of a similar thing I did a few months ago with the same database (http://calori.org) as part of a tech demo/test.

  There's a lot of data included which, quite frankly, doesn't 
  seem very useful (e.g. nutrient "22:1 undifferentiated", 
  whatever that is.)

One thing that struck me as well was the amount of cleanup necessary to bring this data into a somewhat presentable shape. I guess is that at some point they just dumped their messy Access DB into CSV and called it a day. But it's still great that they did decide to make this public domain.

ashleyw2• 15 years ago

Cool site…did you have a source for the nutrient categories (e.g. Elements, Vitamins, etc.), or did you do that manually?

Google Refine made the process of cleaning the data considerably easier, though it still took a few hours.

Udo3• 15 years ago

Thanks! No, I arranged the categories myself after coming to the conclusion that they could be grouped in a (semi-)reasonable way.

The display code is actually a bit buggy but the main reason I chose to have those categories was to demonstrate to a client how irregular blocks of content could be arranged with JavaScript ;-)

I never heard of Google Refine before, that looks like a very handy tool indeed. When I made this, I basically just poked around in the DB with big "DELETE FROM" statements until things looked reasonable again...

USDA Food Nutrient Database: clutter-free JSON edition

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