FoodOn is a consortium-driven project for building a comprehensive and easily accessible global farm-to-fork ontology that accurately and consistently describes different kinds of food commonly known in cultures from around the world. The ontology addresses the gaps in food product terminology and supports food traceability.
FoodOn is a consortium-driven project for building a comprehensive and easily accessible global farm-to-fork ontology that accurately and consistently describes different kinds of food commonly known in cultures from around the world. The ontology addresses the gaps in food product terminology and supports food traceability.
Much of FoodOn’s vocabulary comes from transforming LanguaL, a mature and popular food indexing thesaurus, into a World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) OWL Web Ontology Language-formatted vocabulary. This vocabulary offers system interoperability, quality control, and software-driven intelligence. FoodOn also compliments other technologies that facilitate food traceability, which is becoming critical in this age of increasing globalization of food networks.
FoodOn aspires to be a well-documented, actively curated, and stable standard. Achieving this goal depends ultimately on the quality and longevity of its curation model and expert community. This is where FoodOn’s membership in OBO Foundry helps. The membership provides FoodOn with seamless access to ontologies, which coexist like mutually-referencing volumes of an encyclopedia that cover consumer demographics, agricultural practice, chemical composition and antimicrobials, taxonomy, anatomy, and disease phenotype domains.
Employing FoodOn vocabulary will standardize contractual food references along the farm-to-fork path. It can enhance research insights and customer satisfaction on easily comparable food data. The FoodOn vocabulary can speed up the traceability of contaminated foods and ultimately lead to positive economic and human health outcomes.
Furthermore, the partners in the FoodOn consortium can draw upon the ontology to standardize vocabulary usage in consumer health, nutrition, food safety and security, and environmental ecology resources domains.
The core design of FoodOn has stabilized. Therefore, the consortium can now invite private or public organizations to help steer, curate, and provide feedback on the ontology in a non-competitive environment. The FoodOn team is promoting a daylong “Integrated food ontology development for agricultural, food science and public health domains” workshop at the 11th International Conference on Biomedical Ontologies 2020 in Bolzano Italy, held as part of the overall Joint Ontology WOrkshops (JOWO) 2020 event.
The expectations from these interactions are that a viable long-range development plan that includes both grant funding stimulated by user uptake, as well as a governance model supported by agency-level participation will emerge.
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