Food Ontology Project

From Genomic Standards Consortium

Food Ontology Project

[edit] Purpose

This page is the home of the Food Ontology. It is currently under development. The food ontology is being created from terms that originally were part of the Envo ontology. At this time, discussion of the content, scope and vision of the food ontology is on going.

[edit] Discussion: derived from ongoing envo-discuss emails

[edit] Points of Discussion

• 1.Should the ontology be designed around a basis in biology/chemistry rather than culture or culinary arts ?
• 2. What questions the ontology should be able to answer:
  • what are the parts? (bread, peanut butter, jam)
  • recursively? (sugar content, oil viscosity, ubiquinone content)
  • what is it derived from? (legume, fruit, cereal)
  • means of derivation (preservation, grinding, leavening)
  • does it spoil easily?
  • what does it decompose into?
  • is it industrially prepared?

• 3. Which of these are important questions, which are our priority in building the ontology ?

• 4. What level of an ontology do we want to create: a simple list of food terms, or a more complex form with descriptions ?

• 5. What is food ?
  • Some substances have roles as foods for some organisms (or cultures), other substances are toxic to other organisms. We can do this with a has_role relation.
    • cheese = substance that derived_from milk
    • blue cheese = cheese that has_part penicilin
    • spoiled blue cheese = blue_cheese that has_quality spoiled
    • bone meal = bones that has_quality crushed and has_role animal_food and has_role fertilizer

• 6. Who is the user community ?

[edit] Other Food Ontologies to Review

• NCI_Thesaurus
  • There are several Nutrient lists here: for example: Nutrition, Alcohol; Nutrition, Dietary; Components; Nutrition, Vitamins; Nutrition, Food and Water Contaminants;Nutrition, Fats;
• Unilever Food Ontology
• www.langual.org
• Philippe Rocca's human food and nutrition ontology Image:HuFO.obo
• Food Ontology Classes and Properties:Food Ontology
• A great (and useful) site, What Am I Eating [1]

[edit] LINKS

[edit] Related Ontology Wikis

• Environmental Ontology:EnvO Wiki
• Geographic Location Ontology:Gaz Wiki