Open Food Facts Slack Notes: Data, Trends, and Discoveries

Open Food Facts (OFF) is the largest and more comprehensive open database on the planet, by far. This global collaborative citizen-led project is supported by an international community of more than 150,000 contributors.

The Open Food Facts Slack (open to all) has several channels for discussions, updates, and collaborations. I’ll keep sharing interesting facts I come across in the conversations there, right here:

* Stephane on importing Ingredient Analysis - Ingredients analysis depends on taxonomies etc. We need to be able to replay it at anytime if we change taxonomies, so we can't support import of ingredients analysis.

* Stephane on how Open Database License (ODbL) of OFF applies to third-party apps - Displaying results from multiple databases side by side, or querying one as the fallback of another essentially creates a combined derivative database... So if those other databases are available under a licence that makes it possible to release the whole under ODbL, that's fine. If not, then this use would not be possible.

If the app queries both databases (at the same time or sequentially), then the share alike clause of the ODbL applies. So unless [the other database provider like] GS1 makes its database available under an open licence, it's not possible.

Also see - OFF's ODBL License details

*  toker.doganoglu - "...to access historical records...this is possible with the API. A sample call is for example as follows:

https://world.openfoodfacts.org/api/v2/product/5050083302862?rev=56

It seems that this is not possible with static downloadable databases."

Currently, Open Food Facts doesn't offer historical data dump (JSONL, MongoDB, CSV).

* Pierre (teolemon) - The data (is)...legally acquired, through crowdsourcing and/or AI extraction from Crowdsourcing or existing OFF data. We don’t allow scraping for legal reasons.

* Alex Bourreau - I made a small tool to check what your contributions to Open Food Facts are used for : https://contributionreuses.bourreau.dev/

Enter your OFF username and it shows you a list of scientific articles that relied on data of products you've created !

* James Addison - OpenFoodFacts does have methods to detect products where errors seem likely; it tracks those errors and distributes them to registered volunteers, who then help by reviewing the errors, often fixing them where possible.

some links that I'd recommend:

an overview of the process: https://wiki.openfoodfacts.org/Data_quality

the errors that OFF detects: https://wiki.openfoodfacts.org/List_of_data_quality_errors_(generated)

data quality trends over time dashboard: https://mirabelle.openfoodfacts.org/-/dashboards/data-quality-dashboard

* Stephane - Open Food Facts computes the Nutri-Score, but the formula was created by the EREN research team, and then further developed at the European level

How is NOVA class calculated? Is the algorithm designated by the system, or is it made up for OFF?

* Pierre (teolemon) -  it’s following the Scientific paper of Pr. Monteiro, and we use a list of Ultra-processing markers defined in the paper to trigger NOVA 4, we also use categories in some cases as a supplement (like for Sodas where the whole category is NOVA 4)

* @Tacite - If you mix two databases (your local + OFF), the OFF licence requires you to share your local database

* Stephane - OFF currently does not compute recommendations for alternative products. One option is to do a search query for the category of the product, and then rank products based on their nutrition etc.

* Louis Bastarache - Askoff is a program name for summer projects in India and Canada. Projects come from GSoC ideas proposed by the Canada community. You can find them in the NotebookLM in this channel's bookmarks. Essentially, we're building databases, applications and browser extensions. (edited)

* @aleene - In general additives/minerals and vitamins are not (yet?) in the official NOVA 4 list.

W.I.P