Ontological Framework for representation of Tractable Flavor: Food Phenotype, Sensation, Perception. Tarini Naravane Biological and Agricultural Systems Engineering UC Davis Davis, California,US tnaravane@ucdavis.ed Matthew Lange Food Science and Technology UC Davis Davis, California, US mclange@ucdavis.edu Abstract. Among all sensory sciences, flavor remains a wicked problem. Sight, sound, and touch have all been digitized, and vast resources exist around their computation.. While the biological basis for food consumption is primarily to nourish bodily functions, it fulfills a greater second function of sensory pleasure. Flavor, and the pleasure it engenders, is the primary driver of food choice. Moving toward a semantic web of food that enables personalization of food and flavor experiences requires an interoperable ontological model of flavor. This paper proposes a framework of several ontologies to model a comprehensive view of flavor, by partitioning it into three interoperable matrices of interacting variables: objective characteristics of food, subjective sensory experience, and interpretive communication of that experience. The objective matrix details the properties and behaviour of food molecules. The subjective matrix represents the multilayered and highly individualised consumption and sensory perception variables. The interpretative layer deals with the communication and language used to describe the food experience. Together these three matrices represent an initial ontological model for the flavor and sensory experience portion of the emerging semantic web of food. I. INTRODUCTION In 1973, two social scientists, Horst Rittel and Melvin Webber defined a class of problems they called “wicked problems”.[1] Wicked problems are messy, ill-defined, more complex than we fully grasp, and open to multiple interpretations based on one’s point of view. [2] Flavor among all sensory neurosciences remains a wicked problem. While many researchers have proposed methods for digital replication of specific tastes and aromas [3], to date there exists no semantic or ontological models for operating over food flavor and the sensory experience. Selection of food for nourishment in animals is an evolutionary process, influenced by habitat and ecological conditions, whereby recognition of tastants and especially odorants are associated with (dis)pleasurable eating and post-prandial experiences, and highly influence repulsion/desire for future consumption. Learned consequences of ingested foods continue to influence food choices in humans, ubiquitously known as the multi-modal sensation of flavor. [4–6] Challenges for designing computational flavor systems are effectively highlighted by comparison to more developed computational neuroscience systems of vision and sound, where scientific research and technology successfully mapped physical properties of stimuli to their perceptual characteristics. We argue that these systems were comparatively easy to digitize due to the continuous nature of their data. In vision, wavelength translates into a RGB color model; in audition, frequency and wavelength translates into amplitude/pitch model. [3] This information digitisation provides unambiguous identification of colour and sound, without influence of perception or hedonic response. We utilize an analogous approach to solving the wicked flavor problem, albeit the dimensionality of flavor is orders of magnitude greater than for sound or colour, and requires multiple layers (matrices) of variable separation. The reference to “matrix” in this paper is not the algebraic matrix, but a complex state of interacting variables. The ontology-based model has 3 principle matrices: Objective characteristics of food (Food Phenotype), Subjective Sensory Experience, and Interpretive Communication of the perceived experience. These broadly correspond to the knowledge domains of Food Science, Sensory/Neurophysiology, and Anthropology/Psychology/Linguistics respectively. II. TRIPARTITE FLAVOR MODEL The model in Figure 1 shows the three matrices. The first matrix enclosed by a curve dashed line represents the Food Phenotype Matrix, unbiased by individual response. The second matrix, enclosed in the human body boundary, represents the sensory capture and modulating factors in decoding the ingested food. The third layer still partly Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Biological Ontology (ICBO 2018), Corvallis, Oregon, USA 1 ICBO 2018 August 7-10, 2018 1