FoodOn must accommodate many kinds of milk products – pasteurized, irradiated, powdered, whole or skim milk, butter, cheese, yogurt; canned, frozen, bagged – and a number of animals milk can be derived from. The diagram below shows how “cow milk based food product” is derived from “cow milk (raw)”, is a UBERON anatomy ontology “milk” which derives from a “dairy cow”. In this way we can list many kinds of cow milk product and know logically that they were derived from cow milk. A specific product can have more elaborate axioms that indicate how it is created from processes that ultimately lead back to raw cow milk.

Note that “milk” can be labeled as “mammalian milk” in FoodOn if one enables the ‘user interface label’ annotation property to show in Protege as the primary label display. This is done to disambiguate it from other types of “milk” phenotype, e.g. soya milk etc.; we set aside jurisdictional product legislation label issues here.

The branches below show how many cow milk products in FoodOn are currently organized. We are gradually adjusting this hierarchy from what was originally a flat list of milk products.

Below various animal raw milks are connected to the UBERON superclass of “milk”, illustrating a 2nd hierarchy to approach raw milks from.