I would love to get involved in any kind of project like that where we could subscribe to each other’s recipe feeds. I think it would be great.

Plans for version 1.2 include some sort of support for things RDF-ish [1,2] (though may just mean an easy export facility) and the beginnings of a GUI tool.

I know that it’s not the easiest format in the world to write by hand. This was a conscious trade-off but it would nice to have a tool that hid some of that from users.

Realistically, I won’t start any of this until after the new year. Suggestions and patches are welcome.

[1] http://eatdrinkfeelgood.org/misc/test2.rdf
[2] http://aaronland.info/xsl/wordnet/wn-find-class/

Additionally, creating RecipeML for recipes is a difficult task. Sure, it’s fairly easy to write a few recipes in RecipeML if you’re technically adept, but to do thousands becomes impossible and for the average recipe producer (grandmothers, chefs, etc) it just won’t happen. And you really do need thousands to be a useful database (even your average cooking magazine publishes hundreds a month).

We (Recipezaar) wrote a natural language recipe parser to make this possible and it’s a difficult job. It took us 3 years to write it! Recipes are far more complicated than you might think, believe it or not. And a natural language recipe parser is not trivial software, which is why no other recipe web site has done this except for Recipezaar. We could release the software under the GPL so that everyone can start creating XML recipes. We’ve considered it and we’ve talked to people about doing it but after some thought, people do realize that it wouldn’t be useful. Because, again, having recipes distributed across web sites is less powerful than a centralized repository of freely-available recipes.

Imagine a world of XML recipes distributed around the web on weblogs. An aggregator would need to aggregate millions of weblogs just to cull together a few hundred or thousand recipes. Now imagine millions of aggregator users doing this daily or hourly the way they do this today for weblogs. And if a weblogger had 1,000 recipes on their weblog archives, they wouldn’t want millions of aggregators eating their bandwidth every day to maintain the database for each individual using an aggregator (webloggers today already complain about aggregators costing them too much money in bandwidth costs). Additionally, 99.999% of people who create recipes are unlikely to have a weblog to post their XML recipes so you’d lose the majority of the potential content.

A centralized repository provides a place for regular users to post their recipes and get them seen by the most number of people. And a centralized repository provides an easy way to search for recipes, browse for recipes, review & rate recipes, discuss recipes, etc. And let’s talk numbers…. today, Recipezaar has 73,000 recipes in the database and, while it’s the largest database of recipes on the internet, people still can’t find a particular recipe because there is an infinite number of possible recipes that can be created. Having a few hundred or a few thousand recipes is not a useful database to people. More is better. And acquiring more via an aggregator is a big and expensive job.

Distributed databases are useful in some contexts and centralized databases are useful in other contexts. Each has their own advantages and disadvantages, but like auctions, recipes are best stored centrally where everyone has access to them.

Moving Target: Jakarta Slide うーん、なんでこのタイミングで 2.0 リリース ACL 機構は role 捨てよう といきなり動き出すかなぁ…内容を思いっきりレビューしないと駄目？ ↑ Recipe Markup Language RecipeMLなるものが。 当然 XML ベース。次から…

Building The Recipe Web? Fast Company | The Wal-Mart You Don’t Know Roger Waters performs with Pink Floyd once again (Produced by BookmarkBlogger.)…

Found via 0xDECAFBAD: RecipeML — The Recipe Markup Language (formerly known as DESSERT). OK, stop laughing — this actually does make a lot of sense. Imagine that it’s Sunday, and you’re living in some of those God-forsaken countries, e.g. in

Every once in a while, someone gets ideas about crossing recipes and computers. Of course, I love the idea. Two…

As a programmer and someone who likes food and cooking, I’ve often daydreamed about a variety of possible side projects using technology to manage recipes. This week, the conversation came up on Les Orchard’s weblog (see Building the Recipe Web). Of course, Les and I aren’t the only people…

Back in November, I mentioned that there was a markup language that seemed to be developing to deal with the complexities of cooking. Msr. Dagoski recently pointed out to me that someone has done the same sort of thing to help with the choreography of folk dances. Here’s the big quote from their website:

The goal of the CDML Project is to define a comprehensive formal language that describes contra dances and similar folkdances, can be read and understood by both software and humans, and can be extended.

Is that really what we need? Computers that know how to dance? Cooking I can understand. One of the staples of science fiction is the ability to walk into your kitchen, call out the the name of the dish you want, and then have the automated appliances serve up a batch of, for example, “Tea, Earl Grey, Hot.”