The FoodOn ontology¶

FoodOn is the backbone FoodScholar projects onto — a ~39k-term ontology of food products with a real is-a hierarchy. fs.ontology is the lookup API used by the linker, the Layer A projection, and Layer C prompts.

Lazy loading & caching¶

The ontology loads on first access to fs.ontology: it parses config.ontology.foodon_path (OWL, via pronto) and caches the result to a Parquet file beside it, so subsequent runs skip the parse.

ontology:
  foodon_path: data/foodon.owl
  cache_path: data/foodon_cache.parquet
  prefix_filter: ["FOODON:"]    # restrict to a prefix, or null to load all

Lookup API¶

fs.ontology.name_to_id("olive oil")                  # "FOODON:..." | None
fs.ontology.id_to_label("FOODON:03309927")
fs.ontology.id_to_synonyms("FOODON:03309927", include_related=True)
fs.ontology.id_to_ancestors("FOODON:03309927")       # closed transitive set
fs.ontology.id_to_descendants("FOODON:00001002")
fs.ontology.search("olive", limit=25)

id_to_ancestors is what Layer A walks to build lifted support — a chunk mentioning cow milk counts as evidence for every class above it:

        flowchart TD
    A[cow milk] --> B[mammalian milk product]
    B --> C[milk or milk based food product]
    C --> D[dairy food product]
    D --> E[vertebrate food product]
    E --> F[animal food product]
    F --> G[Foods]

fs.ontology.id_to_ancestors("FOODON:03310029")
# {"FOODON:03315150",   # mammalian milk product
#  "FOODON:00001257",   # milk or milk based food product
#  "FOODON:00004242",   # animal food product
#  "FOODON:00001002", ...}   # ... up to Foods (the closed transitive set)

name_to_id and the synonym lookups are exact-match conveniences; the production NEL linker does not use them — it resolves mentions by dense kNN over term embeddings (see Annotation).