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.
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!
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!
5 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 27.1 ms ] threadGoogle Refine made the process of cleaning the data considerably easier, though it still took a few hours.
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...
Oh, you used jQuery Masonry? That's very cool, I hadn't noticed before!
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!