poivre (French for pepper) is an application that attempts to solve, or at least facilitate, issues related to organizing meals taking into account each person's tastes and dietary or cultural limitations.
Users can create profiles and, over time, add their preferences iteratively, eventually building a comprehensive description of their tastes without overwhelming questionnaires. Also, events can be set up with invitations to users, based on which the organizer can generate reports from the profiles of all the attendees.
Considering the cultural importance of food, poivre takes into considering the different representations each ingredient, dish or term can take within different contexts and languages.
A great example for this is curry. Notoriously originating from the Indian subcontinent, the word can describe an entire range of dishes, usually stew-like and containing several spices, and also describes somewhat related dishes in other cultures, such as Thai green curries and Japanese katsu kare. However, in Brazilian Portuguese, curry largely means a spice blend which, while ultimately related to the former meaning, is a different category of foodstuff altogether, and more importantly, is used differently and has a discrete cultural meaning.
While poivre is meant as a real application, in the context of its development as the basis for my final undergraduate studies project, it is also meant to serve as a case study for the development of web applications using an unorthodox technology stack, that is, moving away from such elements as Javascript and traditional relational DBMSs.
More information will be made available after the project itself is evaluated.