AMAΛΘΕΙA: A Dish-Driven Ontology in the Food Domain

Abstract

We present AΜAΛΘΕΙA (AMALTHIA), an application ontology that models the domain of dishes as they are presented in 112 menus collected from restaurants/taverns/patisseries in East Macedonia and Thrace in Northern Greece. AΜAΛΘΕΙA supports a tourist mobile application offering multilingual translation of menus, dietary and cultural information about the dishes and their ingredients, as well as information about the geographical dispersion of the dishes. In this document, we focus on the food/dish dimension that constitutes the ontology’s backbone. Its dish-oriented perspective differentiates AΜAΛΘΕΙA from other food ontologies and thesauri, such as Langual, enabling it to codify information about the dishes served, particularly considering the fact that they are subject to wide variation due to the inevitable evolution of recipes over time, to geographical and cultural dispersion, and to the chef’s creativity. We argue for the adopted design decisions by drawing on semantic information retrieved from the menus, as well as other social and commercial facts, and compare AMAΛΘΕΙA with other important taxonomies in the food field. To the best of our knowledge, AΜAΛΘΕΙA is the first ontology modeling (i) dish variation and (ii) Greek (commercial) cuisine (a component of the Mediterranean diet).