Show HN: I'm working on a Python front end for the USDA nutritional database | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: I'm working on a Python front end for the USDA nutritional database

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3 pointscjo4 comments

This is excellent, great job.

I'm currently doing an internship with USDA-Agricultural Research Service(ARS), and was pleasantly surprised at the amount of free meta-data they offer to the public. For instance, I'm currently doing some work with GIS data/display and the USDA makes available soil data and GIS data files of the entire US as well as some other places like Puerto Rico for the public through their data gateway website[0].

[0] http://datagateway.nrcs.usda.gov/

Thank you!

I've been playing around with the soil data map, looks like a huge undertaking. About two minutes in I started to realize just how shallow my geological knowledge really is. It's really cool though, reminded me a little bit of my Geotech days.

Thanks again for checking the program out, feel free to request features or bug-fixes if anything occurs to you.

Yeah that soil data mart is a whole other animal. Luckily I'm mostly on the agronomy side of things right now, focused on Nitrogen, so we just kinda skim the data for soil properties (such as hydrology) that we need and display the GIS plots as a visual aid for the user. Then it's just manipulating that data to show trends on the GIS plots that the user is interested in. Having that soil data sitting there in a free and consistent format makes my job a hell of a lot easier, as I'm sure you found with the nutrient db.

I've recently started playing with Json (well, Google's Gson anyway) myself for a mobile application I'm working on so this may be a nice learning experience for me, but I'll dive into your source a little more this weekend and maybe try to knock an issue or 2 off your repo's list :)

I've actually started a second json database for the program for different nutrient profiles and various data that needs to be stored. I'll probably push it later today once it's working. I'm planning on asking a lot more from json, and now that I'm doing it I'm not sure why I didn't do it sooner.

Python's great for working with json because a json file is actually a valid list of dictionaries in python. I've taken to validating it with a python interpreter, since it'll find any mismatched braces or extra/missing commas.

The only issues I have listed on the repo have to do with adding some minor functionality to the GUI layer, which would entail learning wxpython and dealing with the somewhat disorganized wx code I've written. I'm never sure what the best way to clean up the wx code is, but it's always on my mind.

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