Open your beer and meet Open Food Facts at Fosdem’15 in Brussels
Belgium is the land of fine chocolates and fine beers, so we thought we could take this opportunity to open as many beers as possible. Not just the beers themselves (although we’ll definitely have to drink them once they are opened), but the data on the beers labels: what ingredients it contains, how strong it is, where it was made etc.
In fact we are planning a big Open your beer! event for Open Data Day on February 21st, and FOSDEM in Brussels is a great opportunity to “beerstorm” what we could be doing with beer data. A map of the beers of the world for instance.
As an example, here is a graph that shows how much alcolhol there is in Belgian beers. You’ve been warned! We will certainly also have an alcohol-free version, “Open your root beer” maybe?
Let’s meet!
Besides opening, drinking and talking beer, we would be very happy to present you Open Food Facts, give you one more cool sticker for your laptop, tell you how you can become involved, exchange ideas on what we could do and tips on which open technologies we could use etc.
We are currently using Perl and MongoDB for our backend, Tesseract for OCR of the ingredients, Wikidata to link some of our data, OpenStreetMap to map where products are made, and Cordova for our iOS, Android, Windows Phone and soon FirefoxOS apps.
If you are at FOSDEM and want to meet, just tweet us @OpenFoodFacts, e-mail flo @ openfoodfacts.org or look for someone with a barcoded Open Food Facts tshirt! 🙂
07/02/2015 – Update from our contributor Flo who spent a lot of time at the FOSDEM bar to present Open Food Facts and scan beers!
