Semantic-based recommendation of nutrition diets for the elderly from agroalimentary thesauri

Abstract

The wealth of information on nutrition and healthy diets along the web, as health web magazines or forums, often leads to confuse users in several ways. Reliability and completeness of information, as well as extracting only the relevant one becomes a critical issue, especially for certain groups of people such as the elderly. Likewise, heterogeneity of information representation and without a clear semantics hinders knowledge sharing and enrichment. In this paper, it is introduced a method to compute the semantic similarity between foods used in NutElCare, an ontology-based recommender system capable of collecting and representing relevant nutritional information from expert sources in order to providing adequate nutrition tips for the elderly. The knowledge base of NutElCare is an OWL ontology built from AGROVOC FAO thesaurus. © 2013 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.