

Show HN: I'm working on a Python front end for the USDA nutritional database - cjo
http://thiscurrentproject.wordpress.com/2013/08/22/perfect-meal/

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tubbzor
This is excellent, great job.

I'm currently doing an internship with USDA-Agricultural Research
Service(ARS), and was pleasantly surprised at the amount of free meta-data
they offer to the public. For instance, I'm currently doing some work with GIS
data/display and the USDA makes available soil data and GIS data files of the
entire US as well as some other places like Puerto Rico for the public through
their data gateway website[0].

[0] [http://datagateway.nrcs.usda.gov/](http://datagateway.nrcs.usda.gov/)

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cjo
Thank you!

I've been playing around with the soil data map, looks like a huge
undertaking. About two minutes in I started to realize just how shallow my
geological knowledge really is. It's really cool though, reminded me a little
bit of my Geotech days.

Thanks again for checking the program out, feel free to request features or
bug-fixes if anything occurs to you.

~~~
tubbzor
Yeah that soil data mart is a whole other animal. Luckily I'm mostly on the
agronomy side of things right now, focused on Nitrogen, so we just kinda skim
the data for soil properties (such as hydrology) that we need and display the
GIS plots as a visual aid for the user. Then it's just manipulating that data
to show trends on the GIS plots that the user is interested in. Having that
soil data sitting there in a free and consistent format makes my job a hell of
a lot easier, as I'm sure you found with the nutrient db.

I've recently started playing with Json (well, Google's Gson anyway) myself
for a mobile application I'm working on so this may be a nice learning
experience for me, but I'll dive into your source a little more this weekend
and maybe try to knock an issue or 2 off your repo's list :)

~~~
cjo
I've actually started a second json database for the program for different
nutrient profiles and various data that needs to be stored. I'll probably push
it later today once it's working. I'm planning on asking a lot more from json,
and now that I'm doing it I'm not sure why I didn't do it sooner.

Python's great for working with json because a json file is actually a valid
list of dictionaries in python. I've taken to validating it with a python
interpreter, since it'll find any mismatched braces or extra/missing commas.

The only issues I have listed on the repo have to do with adding some minor
functionality to the GUI layer, which would entail learning wxpython and
dealing with the somewhat disorganized wx code I've written. I'm never sure
what the best way to clean up the wx code is, but it's always on my mind.

