Dietopackage

Dietopackage is a standardized, portable container for nutrition and diet planning software. It bundles recipes, nutritional data, meal plans, and related metadata into a single archive to enable sharing, reproducibility, and interoperability across applications and research workflows.

A dietopackage typically includes a manifest with metadata (name, version, authors, license, language), a recipes directory with individual files (title, servings, ingredients with quantities and units, steps), a nutrients file describing values per serving or per 100 g, a constraints file encoding dietary rules (calorie range, macronutrients, allergens), and a templates directory for meal plans. Optional data subsets, localization resources, and provenance information may be included to enhance interoperability and traceability.

Implementation emphasizes open formats and a defined schema for validation. Common choices include JSON and YAML for structural data and CSV for tabular data. Packages may be digitally signed to verify integrity, and versioning supports backward compatibility and reproducibility across tools and releases.

Usage typically involves developers and researchers creating dietopackages to share standardized recipe sets and diet plans. Applications can import a dietopackage to populate user interfaces, generate personalized meal plans, or run optimization under dietary constraints. Dietopackages can be published to repositories or shared directly to facilitate collaborative work, benchmarking, and tool interoperability.

Adoption depends on community coordination and available tooling. Benefits include portability, reproducibility, and streamlined testing across software. Limitations include variability in nutrient data quality, licensing considerations, and the need for mature validation and parsing tooling to ensure consistent interpretation.

See also: nutrition data standards, recipe schema, data packaging, meal planning software.