Dev Tools · 1h ago
Normalizing 176K Recalls from 7 Government Feeds into One Queryable Corpus
A developer normalized 176,000 product recalls from seven government sources into a single corpus. The main challenge wasn't schema differences but reconciling conflicting definitions of what constitutes a recall. Identifiers like barcodes often hide in free-text fields, requiring regex and check-digit validation to avoid false negatives.
Meridian48 take
The piece highlights a classic data-engineering headache: standardizing public data is less about tech and more about domain semantics, a lesson for any startup building compliance tools.
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Seven government recall feeds, and what it takes to make them agree →
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