Global categories taxonomy

How it works

This taxonomy contains the definition of the hierarchy of categories used in Open Food Facts.

The definition contains:

• stopwords (words that can be ignored when matching category names)

• word synonyms (words that can be exchanged when matching category names)

• category synonyms (the synonyms are then matched also in other category names that contains those synonyms)

For more details, see Global taxonomies

Current status

• Nov 22 2016: pushed live

TODO

• Kouglof (Alsatian cake)

Taxonomy definition

The taxonomy is now managed directly on GitHub: https://github.com/openfoodfacts/openfoodfacts-server/blob/main/taxonomies/food/categories.txt

Taxonomy translation

Replace XX by your language. https://world-XX.openfoodfacts.org/categories?translate=1

Q&A

Q: I changed a string for a category via pull request (and it got accepted and merged). Will the new string appear on all the products once a new version is deployed and released?

A: It depends. The canonical categories (e.g. en:cakes) that are associated to each product won't be updated right away, only when products are processed again. The strings displayed for it (e.g. if you added a translation) will be shown right away.