We would appreciate it very much, if you could take the time to leave us a short message. Every user input will help this site in improving and making it more useful to everyone! Thanks in advance for your effort! F.Y.I: We are working on a flag system which will make it easier for users to flag an item that is wrong by just clicking a button.
How is the CO2 emission on the establishement pages calculated?
The distance and CO2 emission can give you an rough idea of the carbon footprint from product has, just for transporting it. The real footprint accounting for all steps of production would be of course much higher. And unfortunately the value for transporting it can also be an estimate, out of several reasons:
- EU publications estimate the emission of trucks in the EU between 0,06 and 0,15 g CO2 per kg of product per kilometer. We decided to use the average (0.015) for our calculation, what seemed the most reasonable solution to us.
- It is impossible to know how fuel efficient the trucks used for transport are and
- whether the truck took a detour to a storage facility
- The emission for long distances can either be lower (if ships or trains are used) or a lot higher (if planes are used.
But even with all these limitations we are convinced that the calculated emission can at least give you a rough information that can be enough, to choose between to products based on their C02 emissions for transport.
Why do I get duplicate search results when searching for an exact code?
Momentarily, the data on eucode.info is updated section by section. This unfortunately creates the following situation: one establishment that is active in multiple sections gets imported more than once. In the future, the lists from all sections of one country will be searched for double entries. The sections that belong to one code will then all be added to it, leaving just one establishment entry holding all information. With a little database trick we can show all the sections connected to an establishment on its page allready, but this trick is unfortunately not applicable to search results nor the overview pages.
Besides that we would like to add a personal comment regarding the regulation: the fact that for instance, one code is as the same time connected to a packing activity as well as to a meat preparation activity creates confusion on the customer's side, since it is not possible to tell whether a product is e.g. the result of the meat preparation activity or just the packing activity from one establishment.
Why are there only 1000 items displayed on the map at once?
The way Google Maps are displayed is comparable to what your computer has to do in a video game: process data based on user input, and combine it with additional content and rendering a picture from it on the fly. Since eucode.info consists of around 100.000 items, it would take a lot of time, bandwidth and your computer's and our server's cpu load to display them all at once. Some computers might even crash trying to view the page. That's why we chose for a reasonable limit of 500 randomly picked items to be displayed at once. This still by far exceeds the number of items any search would yield (accepting whole countries), and still gives you a broad overview of all registered establishments. More about this idea further down.
How does this affect my experience?
If you zoom in on a specific location from the overview, you might not actually see all establishments registered on eucode.info. Try it with Luxembourg: if you zoom in from the initial view you most certainly will not see any establishments. This is very logical, since Luxembourg only has a handful of establishments registered. The chance that these are picked when 500 are randomly chosen from 100.000 is just too small. If you want to see all establishments in Luxemburg, just choose "LU" from the county selector and click apply.
Why even display an overview map that leads to confusions at all?
The idea of the overview map.
The idea of the overview map is just to give you a broad overview about the density of establishments in individual regions at the European level. This overview can also be interesting if you want to see the density of establishments in a specific section. You can get an idea about regions with a high numbers of businesses in the "Raw milk and dairy products" sector, if you choose "9" in "Section" and click apply, for example
Are you sure the items are randomly chosen? I hit reload a couple of times and keep seeing the same items!
The overview map is in fact a search result, that is displayed in a block in form of a google map. Since at times a very large number of users are accessing eucode.info at the same time, blocks and other items on the site are cached, but get regenerated on a regular basis.
Why are there some postal codes or street addresses missing, placing a marker only on the city?
The content of eucode.info is mainly based on the official establishment lists from the individual EU member states. Some countries just publish postal code and city and sometimes even those are not both present. We try the very best to add this data, but at a scale of around 10.000 missing addresses, some just might slip through.
