Open data standards

Thanks for that incredibly thorough write-up @alexbayley.

I think your Next Steps are sensible and do-able.

I've discussed this with Rory before, and we've decided that the best way forward for OpenFarm was a "we bring in crop names from ITIS for user experience purposes", (at the moment, all we're taking is the crop name and binomial name) but we make it clear that crop data is incomplete, encouraging users to contribute information to the crop.

One way of doing this is linking the crop information to reliable sources of information, and Wikipedia seems like a particularly good one for now. At the moment our database supports adding other data sources, and I really see no reason to limit what they link to. Then we decided that we could use a sort of gamification to make our crop database system more complete, using bounties if it starts getting a bit slow.

Making sure that this information is linked to other data sources to be considered complete seems like a minimal requirement for that.

We'll have to figure out how to implement this within our own API, but it's not overly complex.

I'm wondering about the namespaces that Freebase uses - did freebase define those, or are those linked entity defined?

@simonv3 Freebase defined those namespaces.

Incidentally I've been looking at ITIS and I note that it's missing a number of edible crops (I chose a few from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bushfood which lists edible Australian natives, and of the 13 top-end fruits, only 4 were found in ITIS). It seems that their data set is incomplete -- perhaps it is US-centric?

Ah yes, I see from their website: "The ITIS mission is to create a scientifically credible database of taxonomic information, placing primary focus on taxa of interest to North America."

So it might be useful to link to as a source of reliable identities but it's not a complete source. Pity :(

Yeah, it's focus on North America is a bit of a pity, but at the moment it's the best I could find that makes data available under a really free license. Since we're drawing only names from it, I don't think this is a major pitfall though, and prevents a data import, it just means that the hunt for better data sources continues.

Edit: Free in as far as my understanding of free goes. Could have misinterpreted it.

@simonv3 As I understand it, data produced by the US federal government must be released into the public domain, which is about as free as it gets :)

Hey @alexbayley, thanks for dropping into the conversation here! It's great to have someone with so much experience helping guide our development and be a partner in creating linked data and open standards!

I can't speak to anything technical myself (I'm not a developer) but your blog post makes a lot of sense and I'm glad you set out practical steps that all of the projects can take towards a common future.

@alexbayley Thanks again for the write-up! As an aside, we brought your post into another conversation on moving towards standard interfaces for Open Apps. Seems a potentially useful approach for more than just food.

Re. your next steps - We are not working on our http://foodnetworksoftware.org/ any more. If it does make sense to bring it into an ecosystem of food related apps at some point, we'd be happy to start again, and would commit to participating in your next steps if that is the general agreement forward.