prFood: Ontology Principles for Provenance and Risk in the Food Domain

Abstract

Abstract-An ontology, a formal representation of domain knowledge, is an integral building block of the semantic web and is important in building an application within interdisciplinary domains. In the food domain, regulations require Food Business Operators (FBOs) to comply with traceability and track-ability measures when handling food in order to assess risk. In this paper, we identify several requirements to model food, food history, and risk of contamination in order to support the safety regulations of food. Using those requirements, we also identify and apply several design principles for building an ontology called prFood that encompasses interdisciplinary domains, food and risk. In order to apply safe handling of food in the food supply chain, we integrate and incorporate the pre-existing food ontologies with prFood by implementing a mapping procedure. Finally, we validate our approach by answering several use cases derived from EU and/or UK Food Regulations.

Integrating Internet of Things, Provenance, and Blockchain to Enhance Trust in Last Mile Food Deliveries

“…For this reason, provenance records are retrospective and are generated after the events have occurred. Such records may then support various auditing processes, such as traceability of food items (Batlajery et al, 2018).…”

Belief Propagation Through Provenance Graphs

“…As PROV-O is designed to be domain agnostic, it often gets extended in specific domains. For instance, Markovic et al extend the PROV-O to monitor food safety by documenting constraints that may be associated with an HACCP plan [2] and Batlajery et al provide prFood ontology to capture and model food and risk along the food supply chain [1]. Another works by Ali and Moreau [11], Packer et al [12], and Markovic et al [13] also extend PROV-O for their specific purposes.…”

“…Figure 1 describes the provenance of food, which conveys its history and the information about risk of contamination. To model the risk, the prFood ontology [1] is used to capture the necessary data for risk calculation, such as bacterial concentration, contamination level, risk factor, etc as attributes of entities.…”

“…Likewise, organic labels encompass more or less stringent guarantees that adequate processes have been followed in the production of food products. The provenance model PROV (PROV-DM) complemented by domain-specific ontologies [1] [2] have been used to describe processes of the food supply chain, enabling such descriptions to be shared and queries over them to be answered. These capabilities allow confidence in food products and processes to increase.…”