Building a unified Spanish food database according to EuroFIR specifications

Abstract The existence of reliable data on the composition of foods is critical for a variety of purposes. There is a growing requirement for food composition data to be compatible at international level through computerised databases and nutritional analysis software. The work on data harmonisation and its application in European food composition databases (FCDBs) is being undertaken by the European food information resource network of excellence (EuroFIR) project. Spanish EuroFIR partners have set up a working group (BDECA) to create a unified FCDB. In the first stage, BDECA has made possible the compilation of food’s data obtained from different Spanish food composition tables. The foods incorporated in this table constitute the information necessary for the generation of the database as the second objective. The classification and description of all foods included in our database had been carried out previously using the multilingual system through facetted classification LanguaL Thesaurus.