The Joint Food Ontology Workgroup (JFOW) is an informal group of ontology stakeholders involved in harmonizing the content of their respective food product and research related ontologies. Our work together aims to simplify the annotation of datasets to meet interoperable FAIR data standards, as well as to pave the way to a future of federated, plug-and-play, queryable knowledge graphs. We are ensuring that our ontologies live up to the MIREOT principle, namely that they offer and reuse terms which are curated in the most appropriate domain-specific ontology, covering domains such as dietary study design, nutrition, food products, and food biomarkers. The repository and issues board here are related to the group's work, which is loosely coordinated in monthly videoconferences. Currently curators from FoodOn, the Food Biomarker Ontology (FOBI), the Ontology for Nutritional Studies (ONS), Medical Action Ontology (MAxO) and the Environmental Conditions, and the Treatments and Exposures ontology (ECTO) are involved, as well as agencies who are developing in-house ontology vocabulary reuse capability. Many but not all of our members are involved in the OBOFoundry.org curation collective.
Research and development projects involved in the group are listed below.
FOBI: Food-Biomarker Ontology
(paper)
FOBI is an ontology composed of two interconnected sub-ontologies. One is the ”Food Ontology” (with many adopted terms from FoodOn) consisting of raw foods and multi-component foods while the second is the ”Biomarker Ontology” containing food intake biomarkers classified by their chemical classes (with some terms adopted from ChEBI). These two sub-ontologies are conceptually independent but interconnected by different properties. This allows data and information regarding foods and food biomarkers to be visualized in a bidirectional way, going from metabolomics to nutritional data or vice versa.
FOBI is a member of the Open Biological and Biomedical Ontology Foundry (OBOFoundry), and consequently reuses some ChEBI, UBERON and FoodOn terms.
ONS: Ontology for Nutritional Studies
ONS was developed under the ENPADASI European project, to assist the standardized description of (human) nutritional studies. As such, it includes and covers classes and relations that are commonly encountered while conducting, storing, harmonizing, integrating, describing and querying for nutritional studies. ONS main objective and long-term goal, is to represent a comprehensive resource for the description of concepts in the broader human nutrition domain, representing a solid and extensible formal ontology framework, where integration of new information can be easily achieved by the addition of extra modules.
ONS is member of the Open Biological and Biomedical Ontology Foundry (OBOFoundry), reuses BFO, OBI, FoodOn, ChEBi, and other ontologies terms.
FIDEO: Food Interactions with Drugs Evidence Ontology
FIDEO, launched in 2019 as part of the ANR-funded MIAM project, aims to represent knowledge about food-drug interactions. It reuses concepts from referenced ontologies such as BFO, OBI, ChEBI, DRON and FoodOn and includes additional concepts describing the interactions and the food and drugs involved as well as evidence about them.
FIDEO is a member of the Open Biological and Biomedical Ontology Foundry (OBOFoundry) and is available on Ontology Lookup Service (OLS) and BioPortal.
FoodOn: Food ontology
FoodOn, launched in 2018, is a recently developed ontology that aims to describe food known in cultures throughout the world for human, domestic and agricultural animal consumption. FoodOn is based on the LanguaL™ Food Description Thesaurus, originating in the late 1970s as the “Factored Food Vocabulary” by the Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition (CFSAN) of the United States Food and Drug Administration, and later adopted by the European LanguaL™ Technical Committee which supports EuroFIR partner national food nutrition databases. All of LanguaL™’s 14 facets of food description have been transformed and mapped into FoodOn ontology branches of vocabulary.
FoodOn is a member of the Open Biological and Biomedical Ontology Foundry (OBOFoundry), and consequently reuses many CHEBI chemical terms, UBERON and PO anatomy terms, and dataset description elements are being reused from the Ontology for Biomedical Investigations (OBI) and the Information Architecture Ontology (IAO).
(paper)
MeatyL@b: Food production ontology process modelling - does this have an associated ontology?
ONE: Ontology for Nutritional Epidemiology
Nutritional epidemiology is a specific research area. The generic ontologies for food science, nutrition science or medical science failed to cover the specific characteristics of nutritional epidemiologic studies. As a result, we developed the ontology for nutritional epidemiology (ONE) in order to describe nutritional epidemiologic studies accurately.
The present work is an extension of the Ontology for Nutritional Studies (ONS) that was developed as a comprehensive ontology to describe research in a broader human nutrition domain. The present work adds value to FoodOn, which formulates descriptions of nutrients, food items and diets.
The ONE is a member of the Open Biological and Biomedical Ontology Foundry (OBOFoundry), the Ontology Lookup Service (OLS) and the BioPortal.
MAxO: Medical Actions Ontology
The Medical Actions Ontology (MAxO) is a developing ontology that provides a structured vocabulary for medical procedures, interventions, therapies, and treatments, including nutrition based medical interventions.
ECTO: Environmental Conditions, Treatments, and Exposures Ontology
The Environmental Conditions, Treatments, and Exposures Ontology is a developing ontology that utilizes existing OBO ontologies such as ExO, CHEBI and ENVO to make ready-made precomposed classes for use in describing experimental treatments of plants and model organisms, exposures of humans or any other organisms to stressors through a variety of routes, stimuli, any kind of environmental condition or change in condition that can be experienced by an organism or population of organisms on earth. ECTO includes terms to represent exposure to specific foods, diets, or nutrients.