Content provider, Pearson, has announced the launch of Kitchen Manager, a new dataset that allows developers to access recipes and obtain information about their ingredients and nutritional information.
This new API, to be unveiled this week at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, is available through the Plug & Play platform launched by Pearson in September last year. Kitchen Manager allows developers to access culinary data associated to recipes, including type of cuisine, source of the recipe and available ingredients. For each recipe, thumbnail and full size images are available.
Kitchen Manager is the first Plug & Play dataset from Pearson Education North America, and it joins other Pearson datasets including the Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English, Dorling Kindersley (DK) Eyewitness Guides (London, New York, Washington DC, Berlin, Prague, Rome, Paris, and Barcelona) and FT Press. Pearson is the first publisher of its size and breadth to invest in open data in this way.
Diana Stepner, head of future technologies at Pearson, commented on the growth of the project: 'An important aspect for developers is who owns the intellectual property (IP). When we started this project, developers told us they wanted to own what they produce, so they own the IP to their work. Pearson works with developers as they need it, adding content they require. And now we have launched Kitchen Manager to provide more for developers to go for.'
She continued: 'We are very interested in innovative ways of using our content, and of reaching our customers, who may be hiding in various nooks and crannies we haven't reached yet, but who may instead access mobile content created by developers.'
Stepner added: 'Much like fusion cuisine, Plug & Play allows developers to take Pearson's rich content and blend it with other data, creating new and innovative apps and services. We will continue to collaborate with developers through Plug & Play, exploring the potential of APIs, and will release more datasets to whet their appetite in 2012.'
To make all the content in Plug & Play even easier to use, Pearson has partnered with Zuora, the subscription billing and commerce platform. Zuora has been integrated directly with Pearson's API platform as the payment gateway.
Developers can choose the Pearson content they want to work with, begin drawing on the data for free then convert to paid plans once their activity has reached a specified threshold with the developer retaining all IP.
Plug & Play is provided by Pearson's Future Technologies & Partnerships team. The team identifies potential technology partnerships, explores start-up collaborations, and develops future-facing prototypes that can be adopted by Pearson business groups to build into full products.
