FATO: The Food Allergen Traceability Ontology

Submitted by George Baryannis on 12/11/2025 - 10:14

Tracking #: 3988-5202

Authors: 
George Baryannis
Lili Jia
Emmanuel Papadakis

Responsible editor: 
Stefano Borgo

Submission type: 
Ontology Description
Abstract: 
With the increase of food allergic population worldwide, food allergen traceability has become an imperative food safety concern. Food businesses, however, have difficulty ensuring food allergen traceability because it is time-consuming and costly to obtain accurate food allergen data along the supply chain. Semantic Web technologies have great potential to improve efficiency and accuracy of food allergen traceability through automating food data exchange along the supply chain. In this paper, we present the Food Allergen Traceability Ontology (FATO), the first ontology that focuses on food allergen management and traceability processes. To overcome the overspecification problem in the development of ontologies, we propose the integration of a range of knowledge sources on improving food allergen management, in addition to domain experts, to inform the development of FATO. The ontology builds on and is compatible with existing food and product ontologies and models and captures knowledge on food allergen declarations, food allergen management processes and traceability. Application examples are provided to illustrate how FATO can be employed to address long-standing issues in food allergen management as well as drive innovation in food businesses.
Full PDF Version: 
PDF icon swj3988.pdf
Previous Version: 
FATO: The Food Allergen Traceability Ontology
Tags: 
Reviewed
Long-term Stable Link to Resources: 
https://w3id.org/FATO

Decision/Status: 
Accept

Solicited Reviews:
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Review #1
By Yannis Marketakis submitted on 08/Jan/2026
Suggestion:
Accept
Review Comment:

I have reviewed the revised version of the paper and am pleased to see that the authors have carefully addressed the comments and suggestions raised in my initial review. In particular, the additional references to relevant knowledge sources and related work strengthen the positioning of the contribution within the existing literature, and the revisions improve the overall completeness and clarity of the paper.

The paper remains well structured and clearly written, and the ontology is presented in a convincing manner. The application scenarios and evaluation discussion continue to support the relevance and potential impact of FATO in the area of food allergen management and traceability.

I have only noticed a small number of typographical and formatting issues, which are listed below, that can be easily corrected during the final editing stage and do not affect the substance of the contribution.

Based on the revised manuscript, I recommend the acceptance of the paper.

Small revisions:

- consider revising the sentence "we provide a systemic approach" to "we provide a systematic approach" (found in the seconc-to-last paragraph of the Introduction); systematic is used to emphasise that something is organised, step-by-step and methodological. I think this is what the authors would like to use. There is also another occurrence of 'systemic' in the same paragraph.
- Section numbers are missing, as a consequence all references to Sections are empty (e.g. in the last paragraph of Introduction section). In addition, references to appendices are missing the Appendic number.
- Consider removing '...' from the paragraph starting with "... However it is recognised..." in the Conlusion section.

Review #2
By Andrea Borghini submitted on 12/Jan/2026
Suggestion:
Accept
Review Comment:

Thanks to the authors for throughly addressing the comments.