The construction of high capacity data sharing networks to support increasing government and commercial data exchange has highlighted a key roadblock: the content of existing Internet-connected information remains siloed due to a multiplicity of local languages and data dictionaries. This lack of a digital lingua franca is obvious in the domain of human food as materials travel from their wild or farm origin, through processing and distribution chains, to consumers. Well defined, hierarchical vocabulary, connected with logical relationships—in other words, an ontology—is urgently needed to help tackle data harmonization problems that span the domains of food security, safety, quality, production, distribution, and consumer health and convenience. FoodOn ( http://foodon.org ) is a consortium-driven project to build a comprehensive and easily accessible global farm-to-fork ontology about food, that accurately and consistently describes foods commonly known in cultures from around the world. FoodOn addresses food product terminology gaps and supports food traceability. Focusing on human and domesticated animal food description, FoodOn contains animal and plant food sources, food categories and products, and other facets like preservation processes, contact surfaces, and packaging. 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 that provides system interoperability, quality control, and software-driven intelligence. FoodOn compliments other technologies facilitating food traceability, which is becoming critical in this age of increasing globalization of food networks.

Many current food systems are unsustainable because they cause significant resource depletion and unacceptable environmental impacts. This problem is so severe, it can be argued that the food eaten today is equivalent to a fossil resource. The transition to sustainable food systems will require many changes but of particular importance will be the harnessing of internet technology, in the form of an ‘Internet of Food’, which offers the chance to use global resources more efficiently, to stimulate rural livelihoods, to develop systems for resilience and to facilitate responsible governance by means of computation, communication, education and trade without limits of knowledge and access. A brief analysis of the evidence of resource depletion and environmental impact associated with food production and an outline of the limitations of tools like life cycle assessment, which are used to quantify the impact of food products, indicates that the ability to combine data across the whole system from farm to human will be required in order to design sustainable food systems. Developing an Internet of Food, as a precompetitive platform on which business models can be built, much like the internet as we currently know it, will require agreed vocabularies and ontologies to be able to reason and compute across the vast amounts of data that are becoming available. The ability to compute over large amounts of data will change the way the food system is analysed and understood and will permit a transition to sustainable food systems.

Global increases in metabolic diseases that can be influenced by diet have re-emphasized the importance of considering how different foods can improve human health. The entire agricultural enterprise has an unprecedented opportunity to increase its value by producing foods that improve the health of consumers. Research efforts in agriculture/food science/nutrition are endeavoring to do so, although little tangible success has been achieved. At the core of the problem is a failure to define the goal itself: health. Health, as a scientifically measurable concept, is poorly defined relative to disease, and yet consensus-based, curated vocabularies that describe the multiple variations in human health in useful terms are critical to unifying the scientific fields related to agriculture and nutrition. Each of the life-science disciplines relating to health has developed databases, thesauri, and/or ontologies to capture such knowledge. High-throughput and -omic technologies are expanding both the amount and heterogeneity of available information. Unfortunately, the language used to describe substantially similar (even logically equivalent) concepts is often different between information systems. Increasing the future value of agriculture, therefore, will depend on creating a process for generating common ontologies of the concept of health, and guiding the development of a common language. This paper illustrates a framework for integrating heterogeneous ontologies into interdisciplinary, foods-for-health knowledge systems. A common system of language that describes health and is shared by all the life-science disciplines will provide immediate benefits in terms of increased health-claim regulatory efficiencies and predictive functions for individualized diets. Ultimately, these vocabularies will guide agriculture to its next goal of producing health-enhancing foods.

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