Abstract

This brief talk will outline the need for a global food ontology to flexibly represent food across human and natural ecosystems. From an anthropocentric point of view, the sustainability and resilience of the global food system - including the sustainability of ecosystems and human-made networks which support it - should be closely interlinked with entities which realise food roles and the global policy objectives to secure food supply for all. From a more "natural" point of view, a truly global food ontology should be flexible enough to link taxa (including humans) to their consumers via the simultaneous realisation of prey, detrital, and food roles. This feature would provide a semantic basis to model food webs and, in combination with compositional inventories, nutritional profiles for ecoinformatics. These anthropogenic and natural perspectives will inevitably converge as a biospheric representation of trophic patterns emerges, a process which a flexible food ontology can greatly accelerate. Vitally, these aims will require coordination across multiple established and emerging ontologies to be feasible in the long term and a number of potential synergies with the Environment Ontology, the Agronomy Ontology, and the Sustainable Development Goal Interface Ontology will be proposed.

Year of Publication
2016
Conference Name
International Conference on Biomedical Ontology and BioCreative (ICBO BioCreative 2016)
Date Published
11/30/16
Publisher
CEUR-ws.org Volume 1747
Other Numbers
Vol-1747|urn:nbn:de:0074-1747-1
URL
http://icbo.cgrb.oregonstate.edu/
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