Antimicrobials On-line: Concept and Application for Multidisciplinary Knowledge Exchange in the Food Domain
Nicole J. J. P. Koenderink, J.L. Hulzebos, Savannah N Roller, Bill Egan, Jan L Top · Socio-Environmental Systems Modeling · 2003
Industrial food developers need reliable, comprehensive, and complete information on the application of food preservative agents.To this end, we have collected and integrated knowledge from food technologists, microbiologists and food specialists in universities, research institutes, and industry.This knowledge has been implemented in a web-based expert knowledge system.Presently it holds the properties and practical applications of five natural antimicrobial preservatives and their relation to a large number of microbes and food types.Experiments described in literature are available at a user-specified level of detail.For example, given a type of microbe and food, users can search the system automatically to find the antimicrobial compound that guarantees a required shelf life time.Scientists can search the same system for detailed information on the degree in which certain strains of microbes are sensitive to a certain combination of anti-microbial compounds.The technical objective behind the design of the system was to support associative search methods, which yield a higher recall and relevance for the search results than traditional database queries.Therefore, the food domain knowledge was modelled using ontologies, which enabled us to store context knowledge in a semantic network.The ontologies developed were implemented and made accessible using a conceptual query language (SeRQL) and a metadatabase (Sesame).This has resulted in a highly flexible and easy to maintain knowledge base.A second advantage of structuring the food domain knowledge in this way is that in future project the already gathered knowledge can easily be reused and extended.