Ingredients ontology

Why?

Why do we need an ingredients ontology? The ontology describes how ingredients are derived from each other and how ingredients can be combined into new ingredients. An ontology might be useful to:

• normalise ingredients - Producers take a lot of freedom in describing the ingredients they use. An ontology helps to standardise the ingredients.
• find hidden ingredients - an ingredient might contain hidden ingredients, the ontology might reveal these. For example butter contains butterfat.
• show combined ingredients - an ingredient might appear as a single ingredient. In reality however
• reveal processed ingredients - often an ingredient is derived from an other ingredient through some process. We can make explicit what these processes are. Example clarified butter is created from butter by separating the milk solids and water from the butterfat.
• show ingredient incompleteness - often an ingredient is incomplete defined in an ingredient list. For instance if an ingredient-list specifies milk, it should be defined from which mammal the milk comes from, for instance cow's milk.

Theory

What theory can be used to base an food ingredients taxonomy on? Is there already a food ontology somewhere?

Nodes

Each node in the ontology is an ingredient, as is found in ingredient lists of food products. Producers take a lot of freedom in describing the ingredients they use. This implies that an approach is needed to standardise the ingredients that are found in the ingredients list.

Relationships

The following relationship types can be used to described how

• contains - describes if an ingredient contains other ingredients. If possible the fraction/percentage/range can be added;
• derived from - describes if an ingredient is derived from an other ingredient. In addition one could add a description of transformation process used;
• isa - describes a detailed specification of an ingredient