Food data and food vocabularies : PNH 2020 deliverable D5.3

The project Personalised Nutrition and Health (PNH) aims to develop methods and knowledge needed to make personalised food and health advice. Smart applications can support consumers in making healthy, but also safe and sustainable choices. Such applications require the availability of high quality data about food products and ingredients. This includes attributes such as nutritional values, ingredients, way of application, associated CO2 impact, etc. This information needs to be accessible, timely, accurate, reliable, comprehensive and reusable. Currently, many data sources about food are available. Although very rich in content, it is very difficult to extract and combine the data from these different sources, and even then many values remain missing or unreliable. An approach based on the principles of Linked Data can make the data available for automated processing, in particular if additional attributes are specified. Another issue related to the availability of product data is that it should ideally be openly available, directly from the producer of a product. In this document we focus on food data for health, in particular in the context of personalised dietary advice. We present an overview of existing data sources. It appears that for the Netherlands, nutritional values at the level of generic products can still best be found the NEVO table, but they are also increasingly available at the level of commercial product from the GS1 data pool. Many other attributes related to consumer preferences, application context, sustainable responsible production are scattered, if available at all. Several other data sources are available for retrieving food data relevant for applications in personalised nutrition. These data sources are still difficult to combine. Therefore the development of semantic standards is crucial. The most promising approach would be to combine the efforts by GS1, representing food supply chains worldwide and FoodOn as a research effort to introduce Linked Data standards in the world of food.