Web and CORBA Interfaces of Food Thermal Conductivity Database

초록

It is often necessary to make reference to accurate food thermal properties in order for the successful prediction of the behavior of foods during food unit operations. Although these data are available from miscellaneous sources including published papers, books and food properties database, we have not taken advantages of the computer network or World Wide Web (WWW). As the computer network is spread all over the world, the demands to access food properties through internet have been increased rapidly. Food thermal property such as thermal conductivity data that can be accessed via internet is of interest to food scientists and engineers working in research, teaching, and food industries. Therefore, two types of interfaces of food thermal conductivity database: WWW and CORBA (Common Object Request Broker Architecture) were developed. Because the data of different sources have many different forms, we first design general-purpose database (DB) tables such that they can hold all different types of thermal conductivity data from different sources. Using the web interface, the users can search the property by both food name and food category. A special feature of this interface is that the users can draw the food properties either 2-dimensionally or 3-dimensionally. The users could select different foods and draw their properties on the same graph, which greatly help the users to compare the properties of different foods.