2015

Diet Ontology for Healthier Life

Muhammad Asif Razzaq, Sungyoung Lee
Ubiquitous Computing Lab, Department of Computer Engineering,
Kyung Hee University, South Korea
{asif.razzaq, sylee}@oslab.khu.ac.kr
ABSTRACT
The conceptual model for integrating food nutrient standards with lifestyle has been proposed and
presented by identifying energy requirements for users. As a part of solution, various nutrient
standards, ontologies build on those standards, linking these ontology knowledge with user activities
and dietary requirements has been discussed. Appropriate recipes are recommended based on user
preferences with essential nutrients as to cope with energy level required by user performing different
activities. Twelve different ontologies have been studied and analyzed for the expressive power of
their concepts. This paper demonstrates an idea for the future healthier society requirements by
making the people healthier through Semantic ontology food.

healthier lifestyles.
We have figured out various
conceptual entities bonded with relationships as
shown in Fig. 1 and can be extended in future.
The rest of the paper is organized as follows. Firstly,
we will summarize base knowledge for food ontologies
[2], then we will discuss the overview of our
conceptual model to be adopted in our research,
finally we will share our concept how base knowledge
will be utilized in recipe planner as per users food
requirements.

1. INTRODUCTION
Currently evolution of information technology has
lead us to accumulate large amount of information
gathered in various forms. The problem is integration
and reusability of this information which can be
extracted by using certain criteria, this knowledge may
be used for recommending and predicting future for
human beings as well. Capturing large amount of
data, managing it, and relating it with different
concepts can be handled with Semantic Web
Technologies with ultimate goal of formalizing a
domain of knowledge. Ontological data structure in
the form of classes and relations between them can
be scalable and future extensions with other concepts
can be made in future, so this makes the model
extensible and flexible.
In this paper, we have
represented data in the form of ontology using OWL
and RDF [1] for information extraction.
In order to address our research idea, we proposed
a conceptual model to predict / recommend food
recipe based on user energy requirements. This was
achieved by integrating user activities, utilized energy
and further energy requirements with food ontology.
The Concept of food ontology [2] gathered about
food groups information provided by USDA was
utilized in our proposed conceptual model.
The
purpose of integrating structure of knowledge based
on food product with user energy consumption is to
promote,
healthy
diet
recommendation.
This
conceptual model would extend the powerful use of
ontologies in daily life activities for common user,
which eventually would affect society with promoting

2. METHODOLOGY
Anything that can be eaten or drunk by human
based on any recipe constituting of nutrients comes
under food Ontology developed by [2].
A brief explanation for currently prevailing nutrients
standards is given as under:
USDA:
The USDA National Nutrient Database for
Standard Reference (SR) is the major source of food
composition data in the United States. It provides the
foundation for most food composition databases in
terms of nutrient lists for selected foods and nutrients
of Individual food. Reports of all the foods, includes
scientific names, refuse, and nutrient content.
CNF:
Canadian Nutrient File (CNF) provides
bilingual food composition database and provides
average values for nutrients in foods available in
Canada.
ENDB: The EPIC Nutrient Database Project (ENDB)
Procedures developed to improve the comparability of
Nutrient Databases (NDBs) based on the study
amongst 10 European countries.
LanguaL:
International
Framework
for
food

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requirements based on users Nutrient calculator. The
recipe will be recommended by recipe manager. This
would contain balanced diet based on user
requirement containing measured nutrient [2]. This
recommended diet would be according to the daily
nutrient limit as stored in this ontology. The working
mechanism can be seen in the conceptual model
shown in Fig. 2. The selected parameter of nutrients
protein enlists food items under food group Dairy
and Egg Products. The obtained values for different
protein level (grams) and energy (kcal) are as per
USDA for different food items.

description under Public Health England in which

McCance and Widdowsons presented composition of
foods integrated dataset in March 2015.
3. RESULTS AND DISCUSSION
We followed [2], in which food group information is
extracted from the USDA's National Nutrient Database,
Standard Release 23. Each food group represents a
class of foods with different characteristics. The
ontological database contains the 25 food groups [2],
besides classifying food groups, we can find nutrients
with measurements which would be included in recipe
of the user. The nutrient measurements followed in
these ontologies are as per USDA standards.

Fig. 2 Conceptual Diagram

4. CONCLUSION
In this paper we recommend a conceptual model
suggesting food recipe fulfilling the criteria of
balanced diet based on users requirements with
respect to users performed activities.
5. ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

Fig. 1 Ontology Schema based on USDA Nutrient Standards

This work was supported by the Industrial Core

Technology
Development
Program
(10049079,
Develop of mining core technology exploiting personal
big data) funded by the Ministry of Trade, Industry and
Energy (MOTIE, Korea)

The importance of each nutrient cannot be ignored

and has an important role to support peoples daily
physical activities. In order to cater healthier life of
people, the diet must contain balanced proportioned
vitamins, carbohydrate, fats, proteins and various
other minerals. Based on the users personalized
scheduler, the nutrient requirements will be calculated
in terms of weight related to the energy. Energy
balance will be the balance of calories consumed
through eating and drinking, compared to calories
burned through physical activities depicted through the
user scheduler and calculated through nutrient
calculator. The nutrients would be from certain food
items which is subclass of food group Fig. 1. The
recipe will constitute of different food items based on
the preferences in the user profile and user

REFERENCES
[1] Pizzuti, T. DIMEG, Univ. of Calabria, Rende, Itay
Mirabelli, G. 2014, Food Track & Trace ontology
for helping the food traceability control , Journal
of Food Engineering Volume 120, Pages 1730
[2] http://semanticdiet.com/home.event
[3] Chakkrit Snae1, Michael Brckner. 2008, Foods:
A Food-Oriented Ontology -Driven System, Seco

nd IEEE International Conference on Digital Ecos

ystems and Technologies.

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