Design detail sections:

• Ontology introduction
• FoodOn structure
• FoodOn relations
• FoodOn and LanguaL
• FoodOn and Anatomy
• What’s in an egg
• Milk products
• Robot-managed vocabulary: wine and pasta

We have begun the process of creating logical definitions for a large number of food products that were introduced by way of the LanguaL-indexed SIREN database. Currently these products are organized manually under the “food product” (FOODON:00001002) facet hierarchy, but this will be transformed into an inferred structure as product definitions are updated. FoodOn has LanguaL identifiers for references to all LanguaL food source items and other facet descriptors that FoodOn has imported. However, ontology relations allow us to improve the way components and processes are represented in order to sow the benefits of automated reasoning on food product schemas.

All references to whole plant or animal organisms or general classes of them are positioned under a fairly shallow hierarchy called “food product organismal source” (FOODON:03411564). This also includes, where available, NCBITaxon organism terms which are situated under their full taxonomic hierarchy. Note that one can use an organismal source term without necessarily implying a food consumer context; i.e. “cattle” can be used in the context of animal veterinary information.

FoodOn also has a number of other agency food categorization schemes as subclasses of “agency food product type“. These are isolated from the FoodOn “food product” branch to avoid logical incompatibilities with “shopping isle” agency groupings. Agency schemes will be cross referenced to relevant Foodon food products by way of the “has member” relation, thus enabling agency branches to have their own is-a subclass-class relations.