GSOC 2022 - Taxonomy Editor

A taxonomy editor for Open Food Facts

Summary

Build a software to edit taxonomies to help more people contribute and in a safer way.

Description

Status: planning

People: Aadarsh with mentors User:Charlesnepote and User:Stephane

Impact (why)

Taxonomies are at the heart of openfoodfacts in many aspects. It helps identify components (ingredients, labels, brands,…) and link them to useful properties, at the base of nutri-score, eco-score, allergens identification and some other properties.

Each taxonomy is a DAG (directed acyclic graph) where leaves have one or more parents. Currently the taxonomy is in a raw text file in our repository: https://github.com/openfoodfacts/openfoodfacts-server/tree/main/taxonomies.

While effective for the application, this format is quite cumbersome to edit for contributors.

We would like to have a tool (online or standalone) to edit taxonomies.

Expected outcomes (what)

The tool should:

help quickly find an element with a search
help visualize the hierarchy of components
help visualize the component, it’s synonyms in multiple languages
indicate inherited properties for an element, and signal when there are more than one
enable edition of those names, synonyms and properties
run some validation on names, synonyms and properties (no duplicate, specific formats, etc.)

As a bonus, it would be really interesting to know the impact of a modification on the application. For that we could imagine simple API’s (one for each taxonomy) on the openfoodfact application to visualize which products would be affected by a change. This feedback could be a really interesting tool to ensure no error is made (unexpected side effects)

Technologies: On the technical side, you can choose freely, in accordance with your mentor, which technology to use, still the capacity for the contributors community to maintain it in the long run is an important criteria.