The construction of high capacity data sharing networks to support increasing government and commercial data exchange has highlighted a key roadblock: the content of existing Internet-connected information remains siloed due to a multiplicity of local languages and data dictionaries. This lack of a digital lingua franca is obvious in the domain of human food as materials travel from their wild or farm origin, through processing and distribution chains, to consumers. Well defined, hierarchical vocabulary, connected with logical relationships—in other words, an ontology—is urgently needed to help tackle data harmonization problems that span the domains of food security, safety, quality, production, distribution, and consumer health and convenience. FoodOn (http://foodon.org) is a consortium-driven project to build a comprehensive and easily accessible global farm-to-fork ontology about food, that accurately and consistently describes foods commonly known in cultures from around the world. FoodOn addresses food product terminology gaps and supports food traceability. Focusing on human and domesticated animal food description, FoodOn contains animal and plant food sources, food categories and products, and other facets like preservation processes, contact surfaces, and packaging. Much of FoodOn’s vocabulary comes from transforming LanguaL, a mature and popular food indexing thesaurus, into a World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) OWL Web Ontology Language-formatted vocabulary that provides system interoperability, quality control, and software-driven intelligence. FoodOn compliments other technologies facilitating food traceability, which is becoming critical in this age of increasing globalization of food networks.

建设高容量数据共享网络以支持日益增长的政府和商业数据交换突出了一个关键障碍：由于当地语言和数据字典的多样性，现有互联网连接信息的内容仍然是孤立的。这种数字通用语的缺乏在人类食品领域很明显，因为材料从野生或农场来源，通过加工和分销链，到达消费者手中。迫切需要定义明确的分层词汇表，与逻辑关系（换句话说，本体论）相关联，以帮助解决跨越食品安全、安全、质量、生产、分销以及消费者健康和便利等领域的数据协调问题。FoodOn (http://foodon. org) 是一个由联盟驱动的项目，旨在建立一个全面且易于访问的关于食物的全球农场到餐桌本体论，准确一致地描述世界各地文化中众所周知的食物。FoodOn 解决了食品术语的空白并支持食品可追溯性。FoodOn专注于人类和家养动物的食物描述，包括动植物食物来源、食物类别和产品，以及保存过程、接触表面和包装等其他方面。FoodOn 的大部分词汇来自于将 LanguaL（一种成熟且流行的食品索引词库）转换为万维网联盟 (W3C) OWL Web Ontology 语言格式的词汇，提供系统互操作性、质量控制和软件驱动的智能。