Labels taxonomy

Introduction

The Labels taxonomy is one of the many taxonomies in use by OFF. This specific taxonomy is used for any claim, text or label describing the product or its content. These labels can refer to the product quality, the processes in the factory, prices that have been won, marketing expressions, etc, etc.

This document describes a categorisation of labels, some markup that is specific for labels and that is not yet defined in taxonomies.

Exceptions

Some logos are not included in the labels taxonomy, but can be found elsewhere.

• Traces
• Packaging and recycling

The data

Before diving into questions around definitions and categories, lets have a look at examples and how labels can be found on OFF.

Example

First some examples.

An example of an product that shows a Fair Trade label and Biological Agriculture.

The images show two Front Of Package (FOP) images.

Each one presents two labels.

The left one for Fair Trade and Biological Agriculture and the right image a Vegan and UTZ Cocoa origin label.

Overview

The labels currently registered on OFF can be found on the website at https://world.openfoodfacts.org/labels . On 5 October 2022 there were 24.313 labels registered. In this listing the labels in italic are not yet acknowledged by OFF in the labels taxonomy (there are also data errors).

The products that have a specific label, such as No Palm Oil, can be accessed through: https://world.openfoodfacts.org/label/no-palm-oil. At 5 October 2022 14.182 products had this label.

Already some attempt has been made to group labels. For instance the label of the Halal Food Authority (66 products on 5 October 2022), has been grouped with other halal labels in the Halal category.

Raw data

The raw data of the labels taxonomy can be found on the openfoodfacts-server repository on Github. The labels taxonomy can be found in the folder taxonomies. And the relevant file is labels.txt. The other files beginning with labels can be ignored.

Categorisation

The categorisation intends to bring some order into the thousands of labels that are listed on OFF. No overreaching hierarchy exists at the moment. Probably it is impossible to create one. But we attempt anyway and see if we can introduce some order.

Examples

Some ordering attempts have been made already

• Animal welfare to show how animals are treated during the production process:
  • nl:Beter Leven for the life of pigs, etc.
  • Free range eggs for eggs produced in free range
• Prices to indicate the the product has a certain quality
  • World Beer Awards a yearly award to the best beers;
• Ingredients
  • No gluten for product that contain no gluten

Maintenance

The maintenance of the labels taxonomy is the same as the Taxonomy Maintenance.

In addition it might be needed to add images for labels, so that they can be recognised by the automatic recognition engine Robotoff. There is no support for this in the Labels taxonomy.

Extending

New entries for the Labels taxonomy can be found on

 * https://world.openfoodfacts.org/labels?filter=-

Everything entry in italics can be added.

Ideas

The description here covers the current usage and implementation of the Labels taxonomy. Any new ideas should be described in a proposal on a separate page. Current proposals:

• Labels hierarchy