USDA Food Nutrient Database: clutter-free JSON edition | Hacker News Reader

USDA Food Nutrient Database: clutter-free JSON edition

ashleyw.co.uk

7 pointsashleyw5 comments

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.

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.

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...

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!

> 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!

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