From Food to Clinic: Mapping FoodOn to the UMLS to Enable Nutritional Decision Support

Food and nutrition knowledge is recognized as a fundamental factor for the health and well-being of communities; however, its integration into biomedical and health knowledge systems is limited by the absence of standardized ontologies that encapsulate food-related concepts. This study mapped FoodOn, an open-source food ontology, to the Unified Medical Language System (UMLS) metathesaurus, a compendium of biomedical ontologies. As the first systematic mapping of a food ontology to the UMLS, the results of this study provide an ontological foundation for incorporating dietary data into clinical and public health workflows. The findings suggest that expanding the representation of food concepts in biomedical ontologies could enhance the potential to incorporate food and nutritional into clinical decision-making and research. Furthermore, this work lays the groundwork for integrating food-based therapies from traditional medicine systems (e.g., Ayurveda and Traditional Chinese Medicine) into contemporary clinical knowledge frameworks to support more holistic approaches to health care.