nelfood.com

Nelfood.com – the Physical Properties of Food Database – is an interactive website containing a vast amount of reference data on food and foodstuffs.

The main database consists of over 11 thousand bibliographic references to published papers on food industry related topics. In addition to the bibliographic references, almost 2000 experimental data sets from the bibliographic sources are available.

Data can be found through the powerful search options. In addition to the traditional bibliographic search options (title, author, date, and keywords), materials can be found by name or searched for by categories and subcategories (eg for the Cereal category there are sub categories such as Barley, Corn, Maize, etc). In all, there are 24 categories and almost 250 subcategories for characterising the food. Additionally, materials can be found by searching over any of the 260 physical properties that are currently supported.

In addition to searching, the site allows users to move directly to bibliographic references, materials, or experiments once they know the appropriate ID.

All foodstuff information on the site is presented in a chain – a bibliographic reference may have multiple materials which may have multiple experiments. Selecting a referenced paper will identify all materials and experiments that ‘hang’ off if it. Similarly, any experiment will identify the parent material and the grandparent reference paper.

Once identified, the experimental data can be presented in both tabular form and as an interactive graph using an activeX component.

Screenshot from nelfood.com showing both tabular and graphical data for a stored experiment

Access to the website is via membership payable via the integrated ecommerce module. Guests are able to search the bibliographic references and identify references that contain materials and experiments. These guests must then join for a small annual fee to be able to access the stored information.

A key aspect of the website is its growth. Members are able to add new bibliographic references and their associated materials and experimental data sets. Once this data is added it becomes available to all other members. A data validation system is in place to identify data that has been added but not yet validated by the team of validators.

nelfood.com grew out of a European funded project (project# ERB FAIR CT96-1063) that was initiated to collect and make available on the internet reliable and useful data on Physical Properties of Foods.

The project was part funded by the EU, received commercial sponsership from Nestle, RHM and Unilever, was managed by Dr Paul Nesvadba, and the internet work was done by TUV NEL. Once the initial project was completed, TUV NEL took over running the website as a stand alone web application.