In order to correctly assess the nutritional quality of a raw or manufactured food product, the first step is to obtain the associated nutritional values. Food composition databases (FCDBs) managed at national level provide values for nutrients of foods. Unfortunately, values associated with some nutrients of interest may be lacking in the FCDB of the country in which the nutritional quality must be assessed and finding values associated with nutrients for similar foods in other FCDBs is a way to deal with incompleteness. An additional issue arises because the vocabulary used to denote a given food in a given FCDB is usually different from the one used in others. In this paper, the authors address the problem of retrieving the nutritional value of foods by querying different FCDBs through FoodOn used as pivot ontology. The article presents a new food source alignment method between two FCDBs. The method has been evaluated on the French and United States food nutritional evaluation. The proposed solution for the incompleteness management task has been assessed with a real use case.
Informed policy and decision-making for food systems, nutritional security, and global health would benefit from standardization and comparison of food composition data, spanning production to consumption. To address this challenge, we present a formal controlled vocabulary of terms, definitions, and relationships within the Compositional Dietary Nutrition Ontology (CDNO, www.cdno.info) that enables description of nutritional attributes for material entities contributing to the human diet. We demonstrate how ongoing community development of CDNO classes can harmonize trans-disciplinary approaches for describing nutritional components from food production to diet.
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