Improvement of history functionality

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Hey everyone,

as I think the global and nationwide big food industry companies (probably the smaller independent ones, too) are shrinking their packaging and along with it often the actual food inside and/or inflations come and go, I would like to see OpenFoodFacts improve its history functionality.

Maybe in a way like Mediawiki (which is not a niche software and can be seen live on our own wiki), where you can compare different versions of a page. I think it would somewhat enlarge but also improve our database:

  • We could detect and log socalled shrinkflation practices with it
  • Aswell as material changes over time: Was it more sustainable in the past or nowadays?
  • And when a private label product changes its traceability code, which probably results in a whole new entry from time to time and is therefor very likely to cause confusion

I can not imagine if the software is ready for this or if this kind of feature is easy to implement, but I really wanna know what do you think about the idea. I am also thankful for any hint or link to anything related to this topic, because I feel overwhelmed by the forum, the wiki, the slack channel, the git.

Thank you and take care!

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Hi @Gerrit,
Since a long time we want to expose this data and indeed observe food along time axis.
We currently lack infrastructure and correct software architecture to handle it correctly, but we really want to work on that.

@JohnGom is also migrating our “sto” files (perl serialization) to “json”, when it’s fully done, we could maybe expose that somewhere (also it’s quite sketchy).

This year we want to at least provide some versioned datasets (eg. each 6 month) to help observe those patterns off line.

Every help is welcome :slight_smile:

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