Review Comment:
(1) Originality
The paper offers a novel contribution to the semantic web and nutrition informatics literature through the development of NutriLink, an ontology that bridges digital receipts with detailed nutrition information and structured dietary recommendations. Unlike existing ontologies that cover food products or e-commerce receipts in isolation, NutriLink uniquely supports basket-level reasoning, nutrient aggregation, and integration with dietary labeling systems such as Nutri-Score. The modular design and implementation within an automated dietary counseling system mark this as an original and meaningful advancement.
(2) Significance of the Results
The potential applications of NutriLink are far-reaching, particularly in enabling scalable, low-burden dietary monitoring. The integration with real-world retail data and its use in a pilot implementation of the FoodCoach system underscore the ontology’s practical value. That said, one outstanding methodological point concerns the product matching process between receipt data and the food composition database (FCD). The paper mentions regular expression matching and manual validation, but further clarification is needed on how broad, narrow, and exact matches are handled, particularly for fresh or branded products with complex or variable descriptors. A brief methodological note on the proportion of receipt items successfully matched and how ambiguous cases are treated would strengthen the reliability and interpretability of the results—especially given the impact that matching precision could have on calculated basket-level nutrition scores.
(3) Quality of Writing
The manuscript is well structured and clearly written. The paper provides a logical flow from problem framing through technical design, implementation, and use case illustration. Terminology is consistent, and the SPARQL query examples and ontology integration points are well presented. The text is suitable for publication in its current form from a writing standpoint.
Data File and Artifact Assessment:
The GitHub repository is publicly available and appears well organized. The OWL file and SPARQL query examples are clearly structured and supported by README documentation.
Recommendation: Accept, with a minor revision if possible
A concise clarification on the receipt-to-FCD matching process, especially with respect to its limitations and potential impact on the basket-level nutrition calculations, would improve transparency. Otherwise, the manuscript is of high quality and makes a substantial contribution.
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