Health, Food and User's Profile Ontologies for Personalized Information Retrieval

Abstract As we aim to retrieve personalized information to user's queries related to food, health and nutrition domains such as “Is apple good for people with heart diseases?”, “How much honey can be taken by a diabetic patient?”, “What are the health benefits of eating pineapple?” and “What are the fruits that contain the daily need quantity of calcium?” The information retrieval system needs to integrate ontologies from different domains such as food, nutrition, health (diseases, body parts, body functions) and recipe in order to answer such kind of queries. In addition, to support multilingual queries, the system and ontologies require aggregation of information from multi-level ontologies. Also, to achieve high relevancy and coverage we need to use ontologies that have comprehensive and rich vocabularies. Moreover, to make effective use for the annotation, ontologies concept names should be unique and self-contained. The main focus of this paper is to integrate ontologies from food, health and nutrition domains to help the personalized information systems to retrieve food and heath recommendations based on the user's health conditions and food preferences. Such ontologies that satisfy these requirements do not explicitly exist. Therefore, we were challenged to develop these ontologies by creating, integrating and reusing some of the existing ontologies to meet our requirements.