I like the idea of making the data about the supply chain public. What products are produced where and how much they cost. The question is how to publish the data. One solution would be to maintain an internal database and then expose a REST service. I'm interested in offloading the long-term storage to another service. For this post I will be looking at Freebase.
Freebase is a structured data store. You construct a JSON object that describes the query structure and you get a response back.
It's the distribution of food that particularly interests me, so my use case is a system for the One Acre Cafe. More than the cost of meals, I'm interested in the expenses for facilities and ingredients. I think people would find it interesting to know the costs and origins of the things they eat.
The use case that I'm going to work through is someone coming in and ordering lasagna. The server takes the order and enters it into the system. That screen they use looks something like:
There is already a topic for lasagna for example.