Brussels / 3 & 4 February 2018

schedule

Open Food Facts: the wikipedia of food products

What if you could freely analyse all the food and cosmetic products in the world?


Open Food Facts is a free, online and crowdsourced database of food products from around the world, licensed under the Open Database License (ODBL). It was launched in 2012, and today it is powered by 5000 contributors who have collected data and images for over 380 000 products in 178 countries.

Scan a product using your phone, take a picture, and you're already part of the Open Food Facts revolution !

In this talk we'll show how Open Food Facts leverages open source technologies such as Perl, MongoDB, Pastec.io, Android, Swift as well as the great power of communities to open data of public interest for health & science, as well as unforeseen applications in your daily life.

We will also introduce you to the recently launched Open Beauty Facts, for freeing your cosmetic cupboard: shampoos, toothpastes, lipsticks, etc.

How does it work?

Using our Android or iPhone app, you can easily scan the barcode of products from your home or local stores, to either check them out at a glance (thanks to the decoding and comparison tools) or to contribute them by uploading pictures of their labels. The same can also be done from the website, where additional tools are available to fill in the product details from the labels, navigate the database based on various criteria, make statistics and chart visualisations, or access APIs and raw data to make your own tools and analyses.

Open all the way

Open Food Facts is developed and managed by a community of open source, open data and food enthusiasts and is organised as a non-profit association. All its creations are open:

  • the collected data is published as Open Data,
  • the software running the server(s) is open source and reusable (it was also used to create the Open Beauty Facts database),
  • the mobile applications are open source as well.

Speakers

Photo of Anca Luca Anca Luca

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