Enhancing Interoperability: The Open Food Hackathon

Every day at Food+Tech Connect you can read about an individual or company trying to improve the way we eat or feed ourselves. There is an explosion in the number of services created to help people make better choices about how we produce, consume, and interact with food.

Despite this the rate of innovation faces challenges related to the accuracy and completeness of data hamper the rate of innovation. Worse yet, even the most promising technologies and ideas are not interoperable- each one reinvents what it means to call a tomato a tomatoe. Open Food is a collaborative project initiated by the five speakers taking part in the panel discussion, Better Food Through Open Data Standards at SXSW in 2012.

As part of the International Open Data Hackathon and inspired by the Farm Bill Hackathon, Foodtree is hosting an Open Food Hackathon in Vancouver on December 3. The aim is to aggregate datasets into a central database and to build a simple API available to everyone in the world. The emphasis will be on a programming interface that works well for real foods (like fish, meat, fruits, vegetables, dairy) and include agricultural beverages like coffee, tea, wine, and beer.

Why Food?

We’re at the front end of a technological revolution in food like none before it. As we prepare for that movement it is already apparent that open work on standards is going to be crucial for new technologies to reach wider markets and to effectively compete against the status quo.

Rather than building informational silos, let’s work together to federate and interchange food data. Your collaborative contributions will be documented and you’ll be able to continue working with the standard and API through a central Github repo.

How to Participate?

If you will be in Vancouver on December 3, come hack in person- http://openfood.eventbrite.com/

Join the Google Group on Open Food and start following the Github Repository.

If want to hack remotely or have a dataset you would like to contribute, email Anthony Nicalo at anthony@foodtree.com