Abstract
BackgroundThe multidisciplinary nature of nutrition research is one of its main strengths. At the same time, however, it presents a major obstacle to integrate data analysis, especially for the terminological and semantic interpretations that specific research fields or communities are used to. To date, a proper ontology to structure and formalize the concepts used for the description of nutritional studies is still lacking.ResultsWe have developed the Ontology for Nutritional Studies (ONS) by harmonizing selected pre-existing de facto ontologies with novel health and nutritional terminology classifications. The ONS is the result of a scholarly consensus of 51 research centers in nine European countries. The ontology classes and relations are commonly encountered while conducting, storing, harmonizing, integrating, describing, and searching nutritional studies. The ONS facilitates the description and specification of complex nutritional studies as demonstrated with two application scenarios.ConclusionsThe ONS is the first systematic effort to provide a solid and extensible formal ontology framework for nutritional studies. Integration of new information can be easily achieved by the addition of extra modules (i.e., nutrigenomics, metabolomics, nutrikinetics, and quality appraisal). The ONS provides a unified and standardized terminology for nutritional studies as a resource for nutrition researchers who might not necessarily be familiar with ontologies and standardization concepts.
Highlights
The multidisciplinary nature of nutrition research is one of its main strengths
Human Nutritional Science studies the effects of food components on metabolism, health, performance, and disease resistance of humans, encompassing the study of human behavior related to food choices
We present the Ontology for Nutritional Studies (ONS) to facilitate the harmonization and integration of biological samples collected using different methodologies, referred to by differing terminologies in various fastgrowing sub-disciplines in the dietary and health research
Summary
The multidisciplinary nature of nutrition research is one of its main strengths. At the same time, it presents a major obstacle to integrate data analysis, especially for the terminological and semantic interpretations that specific research fields or communities are used to. There is a major disconnection between the description of nutrition-based prevention of disease and the understanding of the complex network of interactions by which nutrition modulates health To fill this gap, a set of nutrition-related sub-disciplines (e.g., nutritional biochemistry, clinical nutrition, nutritional epidemiology, nutrigenetics, and nutrimetabolomics) provide fundamental evidence at different levels and from different perspectives, contributing to the expansion of nutritional science as a more systematic and complex discipline [2, 3]. Thesauri or controlled vocabularies for biomedical information do not specify relations between concepts Those efforts can be used to standardize general study descriptions, considerable advances would arise from the use of resources that, in addition to standardizing the vocabulary, include connections/relations between classes, such as ontologies, tailored to the nutritional sciences
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