Adding and adjusting some FoodOn upper-level classes

[Damion Dooley]

I'm making a few moves to get FoodOn smoothly integrated into the https://github.com/FoodOntology/joint-food-ontology-wg/issues/12 joint food ontology schema, and the changes also include some adjustments to FoodOn under ENVO.  This thread will discuss them.

1) FoodOn "food material" has gone without a definition for too long!  Here's my tentative proposal. It hinges on taking most of what "foodon product type" has for a definition.

label: "food material"

definition: Food material is any non-gaseous substance consumed to provide nutritional support or organoleptic pleasure for an organism.

I added "organoleptic" in there, to qualify the kind of pleasure an organism is getting.  What do people think? It is a question of motive - many foods are consumed primarily for their organoleptic qualities, and the fact that they deliver nutrition is an evolutionary side-effect to our motivation.

2) This entails a change to the current "foodon product type" which I suggest be renamed to "food product" in line with the diagram. The one thing the foodon product type" definition never did was distinguish what a food product is from its "food material" parent class. Consequently I propose this definition which adds the missing "product" qualification:

label: food product

definition: A food product is food material that has been harvested and possibly further processed with the intention that it be consumable.

Also I'm consulting with ENVO about moving "food source" under ENVO organism.

As well AGRO currently has "harvesting process" but it pertains only to plants so I've asked if it can be changed to "plant harvesting process"; that leaves FoodOn "food harvesting process" to have it as a subclass, along with a new "animal harvesting process" and corresponding material output classes. We'll need an overall "organism harvesting process" too, for organism material that is harvested and then shunted to food or non-food usage.

d.

[Damion Dooley]

Updated diagram with proposed definitions for feedback

[Damion Dooley]

Updated diagram for feedback:

[Damion Dooley]

Additional changes coming up:

• The FoodOn "climactic zone" branch is being moved under ENVO "biome", and will eventually subsume to ENVO terms there.  
• FoodOn's "continents, regions and countries" is being replaced by GAZ "geographic location"
• FoodOn's HANCESTRO Country is being replaced by http://purl.obolibrary.org/obo/NCIT_C25464 Country, a more common term. We can't use ENVO "national geopolitical entity" currently as a nickname for a country class because it is subclassed to a site.
• FoodOn "part of plant or animal" renamed "part of organism" (this includes anatomical but also other kinds of part deliniations).
• FoodOn "part of plant" deprecated in favour of PO: "plant structure", with existing FoodOn subclasses moved over; they await unification with PO too.