Journal:Establishing a common nutritional vocabulary: From food production to diet
| Full article title | Establishing a common nutritional vocabulary: From food production to diet |
|---|---|
| Journal | Frontiers in Nutrition |
| Author(s) | Andrés-Hernández, Liliana; Blumberg, Kai; Walls, Ramona L.; Dooley, Damion; Mauleon, Ramil; Lange, Matthew; Weber, Magalie; Chan, Lauren; Malik, Adnan; Møller, Anders; Ireland, Jayne; Segovia, Lucia; Zhang, Xuhuiqun; Burton-Freeman, Britt; Magelli, Paul; Schriever, Andrew; Forester, Shavawn M.; Liu, Lei; King, Graham J. |
| Author affiliation(s) | Southern Cross University, University of Arizona, Critical Path Institute, Simon Fraser University, IC-FOODS, INRAE BIA, Oregon State University, EMBL-EBI, Danish Food Informatics, University of London, Illinois Institute of Technology, WISEcode LLC, Nutrient Institute LLC, University of Nottingham |
| Primary contact | graham dot king at scu dot edu dot au |
| Editors | Harsa, Hayriye S. |
| Year published | 2022 |
| Volume and issue | 9 |
| Article # | 928837 |
| DOI | 10.3389/fnut.2022.928837 |
| ISSN | 2296-861X |
| Distribution license | Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International |
| Website | https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnut.2022.928837/full |
| Download | https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnut.2022.928837/pdf (PDF) |
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This article should be considered a work in progress and incomplete. Consider this article incomplete until this notice is removed. |
Abstract
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) 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.
Keywords: dietary composition, food composition, ontologies, nutritional security, FAIR data, knowledge representation, human health
Introduction
Food production and supply systems affect human nutrition and health in personalized and global contexts. [1] However, nutrition-based decisions and data are seldom integrated along the production and supply chain. This information may affect selection of cultivars and conservation of genetic resources, the management of food supply, processing and distribution, and analysis of dietary consumption patterns segmented by various demographics. [2] Although various conventions exist for naming individual chemicals and physical attributes of dietary components, comparison of data and feedback within food systems is often constrained by divergence in formal definitions and classifications. [3] The exchange of knowledge and operational data between domains would benefit from a consistent framework that defines nutritional and phytochemical composition, as well as other attributes of food, including their dietary role and physiological function.
Knowledge representation underpins communication, and it is particularly important for sharing complex data and information within and between diverse domains such as crop biodiversity, food supply, and nutrition. [4] Defining and classifying commonly understood terminology facilitates data acquisition, exchange, and interoperability, where formal systems of domain-specific controlled vocabularies such as ontologies contribute to the representation and sharing of complex knowledge. [5] They do this by defining terms with human-readable definitions alongside machine-readable relationships that facilitate the annotation, exchange, analysis, and interpretation of data. [6] Establishment of clearly defined ontology classes representing domain-specific terminology is the first step to building common platforms that are of practical value to data curators and to end-users searching for relevant information. An approachable lexical representation of objects or concepts from different perspectives, which also helps reduce ambiguities in terminology for non-specialists, is particularly important for describing datasets in food supply chains [7] (Supplementary Figure 1). For instance, nutritional composition may vary depending on factors such as cultivars, cultivation systems, processing variables, food storage, and preparation. Moreover, there is a need to distinguish between individual chemical components and the method by which their concentration is determined. In many standard food composition tables (FCTs) and databases (FCDBs), such information is often conflated or absent. [8]
References
Notes
This presentation is faithful to the original, with only a few minor changes to presentation and updates to spelling and grammar. In some cases important information was missing from the references, and that information was added.
