SpiceNice – An open source spice database | Hacker News Reader

SpiceNice – An open source spice database

tderflinger.com

66 pointstderflinger24 comments

This is a just a small list with very few information, smaller than what Wikipedia lists[1], and even include error in capitalization (SIchuan pepper). This is a bit underwhelming for a "visionary entrepreneur".

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_culinary_herbs_and_spi...

I agree. "The source of this data is the English edition of Wikipedia." I have to wonder how they ingested the data; manually? For slightly more vision, a culinary window on Wikidata would be nice, whether Wikidata is very exposed in a flexible but complex UI like https://scholia.toolforge.org/ or is hidden and simplified.

Thanks for your candid feedback. I copied the data manually into the CMS. I am looking at alternatives to that in the future, there are some projects that try to automate querying Wikipedia data. Have not tried them out, though. Any experience with that?

Don’t get me wrong, I do appreciate the project but this is not an open source database for spices. I was expecting to see a GitHub project with a collection of spices, maybe pictures also a way that I could collaborate with it. A good example is the free-exercise-db https://github.com/yuhonas/free-exercise-db

Am I the only one who thought “circuit simulation”?

No, that's exactly why I clicked on it too.

Yeah, I thought 'cool, finding model definitions can be a real chore and spread between dozens of sites...'

nope, actual cooking spices :eyeroll:

I would suggest listing this as a Show HN post. It looks interesting, but I'm not sure what I gain from this over just using Wikipedia.

All right, thanks for your feedback. Correct, currently this is only content from Wikipedia, although in a more structured form. I hope to expand and improve content over time (maybe even with help of a community). One idea is also linking from recipes to the SpiceNice database and getting more information about spices in that way.

Seems like a perfect job for Datasette: SQLite plus web api and UI

“Datasette is a tool for exploring and publishing data. It helps people take data of any shape, analyze and explore it, and publish it as an interactive website and accompanying API.”

https://datasette.io/

The “Baked Data” style of deploying the data with the app is powerful.

i second this! datasette is amazing and i've been using it to publish data that i collect and find interesting

Guardian has a frequently appearing column called "my secret ingredient" where someone writes about one particular spice that they use and like.

https://www.theguardian.com/food/series/my-secret-ingredient

Also worth a mention is their “how to cook the perfect…” series. While I don’t always agree with the conclusions drawn (taste being subjective, after all), I can usually divine a reasonable starting place for my own perfect version based on the research.

https://www.theguardian.com/food/series/how-to-cook-the-perf...

I often wonder if you can create databases like this using the data in the training datasets of LLMs. Generate the list of spices by asking for categories, countries of origin, etc and then asking about a list of properties for each. You could use these kinds of Wikipedia lists as a validation mechanic.

You can but you will likely end up with some invented spices.

Is anyone aware of a spice that is actually known by 1 name in two different places but is actually two different spices? My mind is blanking

I thought of cilantro/coriander, but that's the opposite case.

There are two very distinct types of cinnamon…

Well that's sort of a good example. The word "coriander" is used all over the world, but in some places refers to the leaf (in other word, what some places call "cilantro") and in other places refers to the ground seed.

asking for pepper in a dish might result in different results based on your region....

cumin and persian cumin (caraway) is one such example

Za'atar is the name of a herb and also a spice mix

Pink pepper can refer to three different species, from the Euonymus and Schinus families. One is from Madagascar and the other one is from South America. As another example, Sichuan pepper can come from 6 different species of the Zanthoxylum family.

Also long pepper/black pepper (piper in Latin)

Cool site, but the AI generated image makes me nauseous.

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