Reuse of the FoodOn ontology in a knowledge base of food composition data

Abstract

We describe our work to integrate the FoodOn ontology with our knowledge base of food composition data, WikiFCD. WikiFCD is knowledge base of structured data related to food composition and food items. With a goal to reuse FoodOn identifiers for food items, we imported a subset of the FoodOn ontology into the WikiFCD knowledge base. We aligned the import via a shared use of NCBI taxon identifiers for the taxon names of the plants from which the food items are derived. Reusing FoodOn benefits WikiFCD by allowing us to leverage the food item groupings that FoodOn contains. This integration also has potential future benefits for the FoodOn community due to the fact that WikiFCD provides food composition data at the food item level, and that WikiFCD is mapped to Wikidata and contains a SPARQL endpoint that supports federated queries. Federated queries across WikiFCD and Wikidata allow us to ask questions about food items that benefit from the cross-domain information of Wikidata, greatly increasing the breadth of possible data combinations.