FATO: The Food Allergen Traceability Ontology

With the increase of food allergic population worldwide, food allergen traceability has become an imperative food safety concern. Food businesses, however, have difficulty ensuring food allergen traceability because it is time-consuming and costly to obtain accurate food allergen data along the supply chain. Semantic Web technologies have great potential to improve efficiency and accuracy of food allergen traceability through automating food data exchange along the supply chain. In this paper, we present the Food Allergen Traceability Ontology (FATO), the first ontology that focuses on food allergen management and traceability processes. To overcome the overspecification problem in the development of ontologies, we propose the integration of a range of knowledge sources on improving food allergen management, in addition to domain experts, to inform the development of FATO. The ontology builds on and is compatible with existing food and product ontologies and models and captures knowledge on food allergen declarations, food allergen management processes and traceability. Application examples are provided to illustrate how FATO can be employed to address long-standing issues in food allergen management as well as drive innovation in food businesses.