Ontological Representation of Knowledge for Developing Information Services in Food Science and Technology

Knowledge explosion in various fields during recent years has resulted in the creation of vast amounts of on-line scientific literature. Food Science &Technology (FST) is also an important subject domain where rapid developments are taking place due to diverse research and development activities. As a result, information storage and retrieval has become very complex and current information retrieval systems (IRs) are being challenged in terms of both adequate precision and response time. To overcome these limitations as well as to provide natural-language based effective retrieval, a suitable knowledge engineering framework needs to be applied to represent, share and discover information. Semantic web technologies provide mechanisms for creating knowledge bases, ontologies and rules for handling data that promise to improve the quality of information retrieval. Ontologies are the backbone of such knowledge systems. This paper presents a framework for semantic representation of a large repository of content in the domain of FST.