Mining text  for new insights

A consortium of Dutch companies and universities is going to develop a text analysis tool to systematically analyse worldwide scientific literature for food-related knowledge. This gives access to known and unveils hidden links and will provide new insights and routes for innovations in food.

Scientific data is being generated at an ever-increasing pace. It is not only hard to keep up, it is also exceedingly difficult to fully access, interpret and apply the data. To facilitate the search for (new) information, Radboud University Nijmegen, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Wageningen UR – Food & Biobased Research and NIZO food research have joined forces.

In the project ‘Development of Food Ontologies’, a large food dictionary (ontology) will be created, which will be used to search a large number of texts including books, patents and scientific literature. Combining these search results in a smart way will lead to new knowledge, which will help industry in their search for new product concepts.

“Instead of having to go through enormous amounts of information by hand, computer software now enables us to screen over 20 million documents in a very short period of time. Furthermore, computer models will come up with combinations that are not easily thought of by scientists, resulting in refreshing and unexpected outcomes,” NIZO project leader Wynand Alkema explains.

“For example, this technology can bring together the knowledge for a particular food product or ingredient from the seemingly unrelated fields of agricultural, medical and social sciences to provide leads for new applications or new markets that had not been considered before. “

While VU Amsterdam and Radboud University Nijmegen are specialists in the development of ontologies and the data mining software, Food & Biobased Research and NIZO food research are able to put their expert knowledge of food to use by applying the ontologies and interpreting the results. Jan Top, project leader at Wageningen UR - Food & Biobased Research and professor at the VU underlines that “the collaboration between research companies and universities ensures a rapid implementation for use by industry.”

The consortium of companies is receiving a subsidy of €445k for the Development of Food Ontologies project from the Netherlands eScience Center. The Netherlands eScience Center, an initiative of NWO and SURF, supports and reinforces multidisciplinary and data-intensive research through creative and innovative use of ICT in all its manifestations. The eScience Center also provides the expertise to adapt the technology developed in this project to other fields of research.