Toward a Next generation Foods-for-Health Knowledge Infrastructure: Purpose, Framework, Technologies, and Conceptual Models

Global increases in metabolic diseases that can be influenced by diet have re-emphasized the importance of considering how different foods can improve human health. The entire agricultural enterprise has an unprecedented opportunity to increase its value by producing foods that improve the health of consumers. At the core of the problem is a failure to define the goal itself: health. Health is poorly defined relative to disease. Because health is more subjective and personal than disease, measuring and managing health requires novel measurement techniques, and the development of new vocabularies to describe alterations in health status, as well as the health trajectories on which a person may be ascending or descending at various rates. Consensus-based, curated vocabularies capable of describing multiple variations of human health are critical to unifying agriculture and nutrition sciences to pursue health. Increasing the future value of agriculture and food depends on creating a process for generating common ontologies of health, and guiding the development of a common language. A common system of language that describes health and shared by all life-science disciplines will provide immediate benefits in terms of increased health-claim regulatory efficiencies and predictive functions for individualized diets.;Understanding the complex and individualized impacts that various foods have on health will similarly depend on the development of highly structured food information resources that can be linked these new health vocabularies describing not only instances of health, but also the absolute effects of specific foods and food consumption patterns, on varied health improvement/decline trajectories. Presented here is a multi-ontological, conceptual framework that spans the agriculture-food-diet-health knowledge spectrum, and around which ontologies from food to health can begin to be built. These ontologies will provide the semantic infrastructure that enables food, diet, physical activity and health personalization.