Recipe Publishing Management System Project

The purpose of this Recipe Publishing Management System Project is to define scope and requirements for recipe publishing tool  to be developed for Specialty food chain. This chain has become popular in various kinds of cuisines across country.

A brief background for this initiative goes back to company’s marketing strategy of sharing their most popular recipes on their website. Recipes added to the site did not appear in the Google’s recipe search of content with rich snippets. They lacked the necessary format for narrowing down search based on parameters like Ingredients, calories, cooking time etc.

On analysis of their implementation it was discovered that the recipes were published in a plain HTML, whereas Rich Snippets required adherence to the Microdata format as mentioned in www.schema.org.
Recipe Publishing Management System will provide:

1 . Simple interface to enter recipes.
2 . Automatically generate the recipe html for publishing on the website.
3 . The recipes published as Rich Snippets, will comply with the Microdata
format requirements of Google’s recipe view.
This document is the primary input to the development team to architect a solution for this project.

System Users:

The Chefs and the food chain’s Management will be users of the tool.

Requirements:

The recipe tool is required to capture and store the recipes in a format understood by the Google’s recipe search. The following layout is a sample search result of a popular Indian dessert ‘Kheer’.

The recipe view displays the content in Rich Snippet format providing information about the name of the recipe, website, preparation time, a brief description. The left panel displays the options for narrowing down the search ingredient or calorie count wise.
Create/Maintain Recipes:

The tool will display an intelligent form for capturing required recipe details to ensure automatic HTML publishing, compliant with recipe micro format by construction.

The form will include the Rich Snippet fields such as Picture, Preparation time, Cooking Time, Overall Time, Key ingredients, and Calorie count. It also allows classification of the Recipe as ‘Entrée, Main Course or a Dessert’. In addition, it includes information like Name of the Dish, Recipe Published date, Summary, Nutrition information, Ingredients, Steps to prepare the dish, and a Video if available.

The recipes can be saved as draft and published once the information entered is complete. The user can modify the recipes once they have been published.

The HTML will be published in the directory based on the category of the recipe. For example, under HTML root there can be directories like “entrée”, “main-course” and “dessert”.
For testing purpose, set-up a simple web server and point it’s HTML root so that it maps to the recipe’s category directory structure.
About Microdata:

While HTML tells the browser how to display the content, Microdata format adds semantics to the content being published by HTML. With these additional tags, search engines are able to recognize the underlying meaning of the content.

Using Microdata you can help search engines and other applications better understand your content and display it in a useful, relevant way. Microdata is a set of tags, introduced with HTML5, which allows you to do this. Read more about Microdata on http://www.schema.org/docs/gs.html.
Recipe specific schema can be found at http://schema.org/Recipe URL. Google’s guidelines for recipe may be found at http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=173379 URL

About Rich Snippets:

Rich Snippets make the search results meaning full for the user by providing highlights of the entry in a manner that either meets the user’s expectation or invokes interest to click on the link and get to the details. Referring to the recipe view shown earlier in the document, analysis of the search results shows each entry is displaying the key highlight of the dish e.g. Picture of the dish, brief description, preparation time, review ratings, calorie count etc. This kind of information contributes towards making a Rich Snippet of the Recipe. You may read more on
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.in/2009/05/introducing-rich-snippets.html URL.
Testing Guidelines:

The published HTMLs must be validated using Google’s Rich Snippets Testing Tool available at http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/richsnippets URL.

Development Environment:

Recipe Publishing System will be developed as a web application using Java/JSP and DB2 database. Eclipse will be used as the IDE for the same. Knowledge of XML is a must for this project.