Today was ... interesting. If you followed me for the past months over on the shitbird site, you might have seen a bunch of angry German words, lots of graphs, and the occassional news paper, radio, or TV snippet with yours truely. Let me explain.
In Austria, inflation is way above the EU average. There's no end in sight. This is especially true for basic needs like energy and food.
Our government stated in May that they'd build a food price database together with the big grocery chains. But..
It would be nice to be able to bring to light the price gouging that is taking place in Canada with regards to grocery stores.
Would a system identifying products from a recipt work for this? combined with other data sources (like web scraping) it would make it a lot easier to crowdsource the data, even if only sortaa technically inclined people do it
It would help to some extent, but to really get people to buy in you’d need an app to do the heavy lifting (that is, it’s easier to get people to snap a photo of their receipt than to type the info in one character at a time). Some people might still be willing to do it without, but how many?
You’d also have to relate the abbreviations that often appear on grocery receipts back to the items they represent, which is more data entry.
Yeah, I was thinking something along the lines of lots n lots of easy shitty data (ex. anyone who can take a picture), some pretty good data (ex. hand labeled receipts), some 100% reliable data (scraped/api) then some sort of system to correlate the 3, especially when prices match identically between receipt and api a fair sized database could create itself.
Also would need some sort of processing center to handle the many image processing requests, but maybe that could be done client side
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Would a system identifying products from a recipt work for this? combined with other data sources (like web scraping) it would make it a lot easier to crowdsource the data, even if only sortaa technically inclined people do it
It would help to some extent, but to really get people to buy in you’d need an app to do the heavy lifting (that is, it’s easier to get people to snap a photo of their receipt than to type the info in one character at a time). Some people might still be willing to do it without, but how many?
You’d also have to relate the abbreviations that often appear on grocery receipts back to the items they represent, which is more data entry.
Yeah, I was thinking something along the lines of lots n lots of easy shitty data (ex. anyone who can take a picture), some pretty good data (ex. hand labeled receipts), some 100% reliable data (scraped/api) then some sort of system to correlate the 3, especially when prices match identically between receipt and api a fair sized database could create itself.
Also would need some sort of processing center to handle the many image processing requests, but maybe that could be done client side
Would stores attempt to hire teams to put in junk data