The basic idea is to carry out a citizen science project to compile an open dataset of DNA information about food and beverages.

Many more details about the project on the dedicated wiki here.

Take beer. The assumption is that the DNA content (genetic or genomic information about every single living organism that was present during the brewing) may correlate with the type and taste of the brew.

Somebody else (at a Yeast provider in California) seems to be working on this, too. The american press (including the NYT) did cover his project, but there is no data or report available so far.

Interface - or how to present the data?

Since we do not have data yet, we generated a random dataset using this Octave/Matlab code: (generates a random data table and calculate the euclidian distance matrix)

#!/usr/bin/octave % lines : beer samble li = 10; % columns : species and sub species co = 30; M = round(rand(li,co)) O = zeros(li); for i = 1:li

for j = 1:i
  O(i,j) = norm( M(:,i)-M(:,j) , 2  ); % euclidian norm
endfor

endfor O

We searched for metadata to add to the data generated and making it look more real. Few of our findings:

• American beers metadata

Webpage of CraftBeerAnalytics

Download data here

• Luc Henry, ideator/scientist @heluc
• Gianpaolo Rando, scientist @randogp
• Soraia Binz, designer @supsi
• Antoine Logean, engineer @ecolix
• and other team members

• https://hackpad.com/Open-Research-Data-Hackdays-4ST1kRoQgQU
• Relevant documentation …
• Blog or forum posts …
• Tools you used …