Browse around the WineLog DB a bit, and you will notice some anomalies. Excel fans will recognize the all too familiar “#VALUE” where a winery or wine variety should be. It’s likely that a tweak here or there in our DB scraping or parsing code would clean up this data, and we’ll be looking into these issues closer to the beta launch.

But even if we could clean up all of the data we have though, it would be impossible for us to have data on every bottle of wine out there. That is, without you it would be impossible. A seamless process for adding wine to our DB is a crucial part of making WineLog work for our users. And that has been the focus of my effort this past weekend. Some features we’re planning for our wine add process:

• Close matches will be displayed to the user before submitting a new wine request.
• New wine submissions will be emailed to admin for review.
• The review email will also show close matches for the admin to take into consideration and offer links to automatically accept or reject the addition.
• While in review, the original submitter will still be able to add the new wine to his or her own wine log. The submitted wine will not be available to other users until after it has been reviewed (and accepted).
• After review, the original submitter is notified of whether the submission was accepted or rejected.

In addition, we are considering ways to allow users to update data for wines already in the DB. We want users to be able to alert us when they notice incorrect prices, magazine ratings, or any other bit of data.

Other options for improving and expanding our database of wines is to tap into, license, or otherwise team up with some of the various wine databases out there. As far as I know, there are know DB’s that openly share their data. Once we’re up and running, some negotiating might be in order. In the meantime, if you know of a database for wines WineLog might be able to use let us know.