Folksonomy Engine

The goal of Folksonomy engine is to unleash an ocean of new usages regarding food knowledge. Folksonomy engine allows all kind of people — citizens, researchers, journalists, professionals, artists, communities, innovators... — to enrich and use Open Food Facts, thanks to free properties for your own use or to enrich the shared knowledge. Open Food Facts, as the biggest open-food database in the world, already feeds hundreds of data reuses. It will allow thousands of new apps and new usages.

Key dates and numbers

• 2021: project launched thanks to NlNet fund
• 2021-10: Folksonomy Engine API works
• 2021-11: Folksonomy Engine UI
• 2022-01: First beta, for moderators only
• 2024-09: Beta opened to all registered users
• 2024-09: Created a tutorial

Why it matters

For food products, it allows to create new kind of properties. Popular properties could join the official Open Food Facts model if they are often used.

For other products, Folksonomy Engine could be the base layer to create many different properties related to many different types of products. Eg. un smartphone have very different properties than a driller.

What we’ve done recently

• 2024: Fix small bugs.
• 2024-09: Opened to any registered users.
• 2024-09: Created a tutorial

What we are currently working on

• 2024-09: start to work on better documentation
• 2024-09: creating new properties for Open Products Facts

What’s coming up next

• 2024-09: new home page

How to get involved

1. Start to read this page.
2. Join #folksonomy-engine channel on Slack
3. Read the tutorial to get started

Delivered

1. An API to allow save/retry/modify property/value pairs for each product.
2. A user interface to for the end user, integrated to Open Food Facts.

People

• Project owner: Charles Nepote; Lucas Huber at the beginning of the project
• API dev: Christian Quest, then Alex Garel
• Product Opener integration: Charles Nepote
• With the help of: Stephane, Pierre, Alex, Aleene, Tacite, Jusdekiwi, Tacinte...

Documentation and communication

• Short presentation (4 pages) [old documentation, to be modified]
• Project document Wiki page. (This current document)

Other directories/documents (if any)

• Main directory for presentation, description, documentation...

Code and bug tracking on Github:

• Folksonomy Engine repo: this repository centralise issues and discussions dedicated to the whole project
• Folksonomy Engine API repo
• Folksonomy Engine frontend repo

Get in touch

Slack channel #folksonomy_engine

Use cases

1. ​ Health and food safety
2. ​ Cooking and preparation
3. Grocery Apps
4. Product qualities
5. (Bad) Food Marketing
   1. ​List properties of products targeting particular people
   2. ​List properties of products related to consumers behavior

See, some use cases we are starting to investigate.

We also have investigated separately mobile use cases, as they allow very different kind of things.

How

As of today, Open Food Facts is made of a set of predefined properties (about 20 types of properties such as the product name, the product weight, the ingredients, the nutrients, etc.). Folksonomy engine is adding several kinds of new individual data properties to Open Food Facts or Open Products Facts. In fact, the scope of such new data properties is nearly endless, so we intend to get feedback from the community to define which one we should implement and how the user interface should look like.

Properties, or material facts, allows to specify a value or multiple values for the corresponding product.

Example: This product height is 35 cm, which ends up in a tag like [height = 35cm].

Sometimes a property can have multiple values:

Example: This product has to be recalled if produced on 2020-03-31, 2020-04-01, 2020-04-02. [Recall: if produced from 2020-03-31 - 2020-04-02]

Needs

• More use cases to better understand how it will improve Open Food Facts
• Dev contributors to improve UI

Wishful deliverables

Here we put wishful deliverables, if any.

• Tool to monitor tag usages.
• Workshop for contributors.

Questions/ideas

• What about a deliverable dedicated to communication?
• Use case in collaboration with scientists?

Archives

Old timeline.

Deliverable	Date	Who	Comments
D1. Ideation document: uses cases (report in wiki page) define first use cases (see D6)	Feb.	XX
D2. Functional and technical specifications (architecture design) (report in wiki page) Functional use cases and specifications. Technical specifications.	September	Charles Stéphane (Review)
D3. Server-side implementation (database and web UI): properties’ database implementation and CRUD interfaces with a minimal UI to validate the design: database implementation (new database or new fields) CRUD interfaces in the backend (Product Opener) web interfaces (in production)	September	Christian (dev) Charles (tests)
D4. Search and discovery integration and APIs. Making properties accessible using simple search and a discovery engine; integration with the advanced search; API access all dev in the backend	April-May	Stéphane (dev) XX (tests)
D5. Mobile UI integration on the Open Food Facts apps	June	XX
D6. Three uses cases: move ambiguous “Nutriscore Experiment” labels in tags XXXX (to be found) XXXX (to be found)	Sep.	XX