International Interface Standard for Food Databases

Abstract

An International Interface Standard for Food Databases is under development to help overcome the technical and semantic barriers to the use of food‐related databases. The Interface Standard is a system for efficient storage of all relevant descriptive information about foods. The schema for the Standard consists of ten components—food/food product identification, food names, LANGUAL factors, other food descriptors, other descriptive coding systems, ingredients/recipes, standards, substances, organizations, and data sources. The Interface allows for retrievals of data associated with specific foods from databases by using queries based on any of a wide variety of descriptive terms. The schema of the Interface has been completed; the remaining work is to build the computer software to provide access to, and use of, the schema.