"Rewriting recipe search -- a dash of sugar, just a smidgen of graph database" by Tracy Hinds
In this talk, Tracy walked through her process of building a recipe collection app and learning from it.
(video)
- Want a good digital recipe collection
- Google does okay; not as good for discovery
- Lots of website resources, but not all recipe data is readily available.
- allrecipes.com comments are very valuable
- Graph theory (nodes and their relationships), specifically Neo4j
- Inspiration from John Resig's Neo4j art history database
- Nodes & relationships have properties; relationships have direction
- Choices
- Neo4j has huge community and documentation
- No good recipe data archive. Looked at APIs like Baked Oven, Edamam, Food To Fork -- all had problems (too much info, not enough, bad units, etc)
- Next
- Goal: find recipes by inputting ingredients and type of cuisine (dinner, southern)
- open source the code: hackygolucky/recipe-modeling (not yet live)
- web interface
- web scraping -- APIs are too costly, don't have enough recipes
- Turn failures into learning & becoming better programmers.