

USDA Food Nutrient Database: clutter-free JSON edition - ashleyw
http://ashleyw.co.uk/project/food-nutrient-database

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Udo
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.

~~~
ashleyw
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.

~~~
Udo
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...

~~~
ashleyw
I've nicked (most of) your categories, hope you don't mind!

Oh, you used jQuery Masonry? That's very cool, I hadn't noticed before!

~~~
Udo
> I've nicked (most of) your categories, hope you don't mind!

No, sure, go ahead!

> Oh, you used jQuery Masonry?

I absolutely love this plugin. I'm using it in a larger project right now.
It's amazing how flexible a site can become with respect to different screen
sizes!

