On the one day a year where food is front and center, at least in America, it seems appropriate to talk about food and technology on Thanksgiving. Digital Trends brought this interesting information to us in their article, “A language for legumes: Can the Internet of Food help us know what we eat?”
The Internet of Food (IoF) has the potential to help everyone make better informed choices about what they eat. At least according to University of California, Davis food scientist and informatician Dr. Matthew Lange. UC Davis’s IC-Foods (the Internet of Food) is trying to develop standardized languages and ontologies around food. However, digitizing food is not as simple as science fiction television would have you to believe, i.e. Star Trek’s replicator. In order to digitize food effectively, everything needs to be part of the same ecosystem. Knowing origins, processors and retailers along the chain from point A to point B and standardizing vocabulary along the way, will not only inform the consumers, it can advance our food sources and ecosystems.
Just like a food co-op, the ICFoods platform has a membership model to represent stakeholders from academia, industry, and (non-)governmental organizations to support and guide research priorities and development.
Melody K. Smith
Sponsored by Access Innovations, the world leader in thesaurus, ontology, and taxonomy creation and metadata application.
