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Welcome to The Ontology for Nutritional Studies (ONS) wiki pages!

Here you will find useful information and training to start using, downloading, browsing and even contributing to expanding the ONS ontology. Most of the documentation is summarised and put together from external resources, whom shall go the credits.

What is an ontology?

An ontology is defined as a formal representation of the knowledge in a certain reality (i.e. a certain domain of knowledge), in a way that different people - and, notably, computers - can understand the concepts it contains and learn about the reality that is being represented. Ontologies consist of defined classes of entities, typically structured within a knowledge hierarchy where concepts are connected by standardised semantic relationships (i.e. "is-a", "part-of") formally specifying knowledge relations such as generalisations of specifications of the reality of interest.

In ontological jargon:

• Classes are the concepts in a domain of discourse
• Subclasses of a class represent concepts that are more specific than the superclass. For example, we can divide the class of all wines into red, white, and rosé wines.
• Instances of a class represent specific objects of that class, for example Amarone is an Italian wine.
• Roles are properties of a concept, or its instances, describing various features and attributes of the concept, for example the taste or the winery producer.
• Role restrictions are used to describe limitations of the concept properties

For the purposes of promoting interoperability among biomedical and scientific domain ontologies the Basic Formal Ontology (BFO) comes handy for organising the concepts. Thus it does not contain physical, chemical, biological or other terms which would properly fall within the coverage domains of the special sciences. BFO is used by more than 130 ontology-driven endeavors throughout the world.

The structure of BFO is based on a division of entities into two disjoint categories of continuant and occurrent, the former comprehending for example objects and spatial regions, the latter comprehending processes conceived as extended through (or as spanning) time.

BFO specifics:

• entity
• continuant
• occurrent
• generically dependent occurrent
• specifically dependent occurrent
• independent continuant
• process

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TASKS

When dealing with an ontology, and ONS is one of a kind, the following common tasks will get you started.

• TASK 1. Browse and lookup ONS concepts online or with a Spreadsheet

• TASK 2. Browsing and making changes to ONS locally

  • Basic Protègè usage
  • Download and browse ONS on you PC

• TASK 3. Contribute to ONS

  • Propose a change via issue tracker (preferred method)
  • Propose changes via pull requests (experienced users)

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Reading list

Link to external material