# FoodScholar

**A hierarchical knowledge graph over a corpus of nutrition literature — built for grounded, citable answers.**

FoodScholar ingests dietary guides, textbooks, and scientific abstracts, then
builds a **three-layer hierarchical graph** over the chunked corpus and serves a
retrieval API on top. Every layer is anchored to real evidence, so an answer can
always be traced back to the source chunks that support it.

```{mermaid}
flowchart LR
    Corpus[Chunked corpus] --> A
    subgraph Graph
      A[Layer A — Backbone<br/>FoodOn shelves] --> B[Layer B — Themes<br/>per-shelf communities]
      B --> C[Layer C — Cards<br/>cited write-ups]
    end
    A --> Q[Retrieval API]
    B --> Q
    C --> Q
```

- **[Layer A — Backbone](concepts/layer-a-backbone.md).** A curated, multi-facet
  semantic menu projected from the [FoodOn](https://foodon.org) ontology (foods,
  health, nutrients, dietary patterns, allergies, sustainability).
- **[Layer B — Themes](concepts/layer-b-themes.md).** Fine-grained topic communities
  discovered **per shelf** by two complementary passes — embedding similarity and
  entity relatedness — then merged.
- **[Layer C — Cards](concepts/layer-c-cards.md).** LLM-generated write-ups attached to
  every shelf and theme, with **every claim cited back** to the source chunks.

New here? Start with [](getting-started/quickstart.md), then read
[](concepts/architecture.md) for the whole picture.

```{toctree}
:caption: Getting started
:maxdepth: 2

getting-started/installation
getting-started/quickstart
getting-started/configuration
```

```{toctree}
:caption: Concepts
:maxdepth: 2

concepts/architecture
concepts/worked-example
concepts/corpus-input
concepts/annotation
concepts/ontology
concepts/layer-a-backbone
concepts/layer-b-themes
concepts/layer-c-cards
concepts/glossary
```

```{toctree}
:caption: Guides
:maxdepth: 2

guides/building-the-graph
guides/exploring-the-graph
guides/visualization
guides/tuning-layer-b
guides/cli
```

```{toctree}
:caption: API reference
:maxdepth: 2

reference/index
```