Allergen Recipe Web Scraping Research

  Introduction Project planning and management is a major part of any research or software project. As discussed previously, I will be using a Kanban board for day to day project tracking, however in this post I'm going to discuss how I aim to perform project planning and management. Planning and Management Typically when planning a software project, there is a product owner or client that is requesting something be researched or developed. For my research project, I will be taking on the role of the client as well as that of the developer and researcher. To be able to populate a Kanban board, I need to be able to split the research down into multiple small tasks that can be worked on individually. My  research project can be though of as being in 4 phases: Planning Obtaining Data Analysing Data Development of Prototype software Although this may seem like a waterfall approach where tasks are well defined up front and then worked on in a sequential order, I still will be con...

Introduction My research question is “What is the best technique for extracting structured data from recipe websites”. To answer this question, I will use a quantitative approach to data gathering and analysis. A Quantitative Research Method is one that “deal[s] with numbers” (Urban et al., 2018) rather than dealing with thoughts and preferences. This definition fits perfectly with the analysis that I will be performing. Analysing the Data To answer my research question, I will be taking a sample of recipe sites and then analysing sample recipes from each site. This will enable me to determine what is the best way of extracting structures recipe data from a web site using web scraping. This necessitates the question of how many recipes and recipe sites I will analyse to answer the question. There are 14 different allergen groups (Allergen guidance for food businesses 2023), so as a minimum, I will analyse 14 different recipes from each site. This minimum however will not give me very r...

Introduction One very useful feature of project management is developing a list of tasks that can be prioritised and assigned to different people in a team. The ability to quickly see the status of these tasks can greatly increase acceptance that the project is on track and can also boost morale in team members as they can see tasks being completed. All these features are available within Notion Kanban boards. Notion Notion describes itself as “the connected workspace where better, faster work happens.” It’s a web-based documentation tool that allows you to take notes, create timelines, create Gannt charts, Kanban boards and more. Figure 1 below shows a sample Kanban board for the PROM05 module on my MSc programme. Figure 1 - Example Kanban Board in Notion There are many different tools that provide Kanban boards such as: Jira Asana Microsoft Dev Ops Notion Excel You Track Trello Most of these offer some sort of free offering as well as paid options. The reason I have decided to u...

Introduction The purpose of this blog is to detail my progress and thoughts for my MSc Computer Science Research Project. For my research, I will be investigating how efficiently I can perform web scraping on recipe websites to produce allergen filtered search results. What is the Research? There are 14 main allergen groups covering such food items as fish, milk, celery and gluten. In the UK and EU, legislation exists to mandate that food manufacturers label food products with the allergens that they contain.   However, in recipe websites (which can be hosted anywhere), there is no legislation to provide details of what allergens are present in a recipe. This can make it challenging for people with allergens to find safe recipes. ( Allergen guidance for food businesses ) defined by the UK Food Standards Agency For my research, I will be examining web scraping methods using Python to see if I can accurately and reliably parse recipe web sites to get details of food allergens and the...