Abstract:
Unhealthy diets are a major modifiable risk factor for non-communicable diseases (NCDs), the leading cause of morbidity and mortality world-wide. Diet monitoring, crucial for understanding and preventing unhealthy diets, often relies on self-reporting, which is burdensome, error-prone, and ineffective for long-term tracking. Enriched with product nutrition information, digital receipts from loyalty cards have created new possibilities for diet monitoring. Current regulations allow access to digital receipts with users’ consent and mandate food nutrition information provision, providing a solid legislative foundation for sharing and using digital receipts in nutrition-related studies and beyond. Building on this foundation, shared ontologies can facilitate effective management and exchange of digital receipts and food product information from various sources for diverse applications. While several ontologies are available for describing food products or digital receipts individually, an ontology that can describe enriched
digital receipts at product and basket levels, including detailed nutrition metrics, is missing today. In this paper, we present NutriLink, an ontology that links digital receipts to comprehensive nutrition details of recorded products, and further to structured dietary recommendations. This permits evaluating the nutritional quality of food purchases within and across baskets, enabling provisioning of structured dietary recommendations to users. The NutriLink ontology is linked to established ontologies, including FoodOn, GoodRelations, and AGROVOC, as well as schema.org concepts, to enhance interoperability. We showcase the value of NutriLink through its role in powering a currently active fully automated dietary counseling system with 76 users in a controlled study. NutriLink is freely and openly available, offering a structured and standardized knowledge base to researchers, practitioners—--including healthcare professionals—--in nutrition and related fields.
