Flexible querying of Web data to simulate bacterial growth in food.

A preliminary step in microbial risk assessment in foods is the gathering of experimental data. In the framework of the Sym'Previus project, we have designed a complete data integration system opened on the Web which allows a local database to be complemented by data extracted from the Web and annotated using a domain ontology. We focus on the Web data tables as they contain, in general, a synthesis of data published in the documents. We propose in this paper a flexible querying system using the domain ontology to scan simultaneously local and Web data, this in order to feed the predictive modeling tools available on the Sym'Previus platform. Special attention is paid on the way fuzzy annotations associated with Web data are taken into account in the querying process, which is an important and original contribution of the proposed system.

Food packaging permeability and composition dataset dedicated to text-mining.

This dataset is composed of symbolic and quantitative entities concerning food packaging composition and gas permeability. It was created from 50 scientific articles in English registered in html format from several international journals on the ScienceDirect website. The files were annotated independently by three experts on a WebAnno server. The aim of the annotation task was to recognize all entities related to packaging permeability measures and packaging composition. This annotation task is driven by an Ontological and Terminological Resource (OTR). An annotation guideline was designed in a collective and iterative approach involving the annotators. This dataset can be used to train or evaluate natural language processing (NLP) approaches in experimental fields, such as specialized entity recognition (e.g. terms and variations, units of measure, complex numerical values) or sentence level binary relation (e.g. value to unit, term to acronym).

Semantic annotation of Web data applied to risk in food.

A preliminary step to risk in food assessment is the gathering of experimental data. In the framework of the Sym'Previus project (http://www.symprevius.org), a complete data integration system has been designed, grouping data provided by industrial partners and data extracted from papers published in the main scientific journals of the domain. Those data have been classified by means of a predefined vocabulary, called ontology. Our aim is to complement the database with data extracted from the Web. In the framework of the WebContent project (www.webcontent.fr), we have designed a semi-automatic acquisition tool, called @WEB, which retrieves scientific documents from the Web. During the @WEB process, data tables are extracted from the documents and then annotated with the ontology. We focus on the data tables as they contain, in general, a synthesis of data published in the documents. In this paper, we explain how the columns of the data tables are automatically annotated with data types of the ontology and how the relations represented by the table are recognised. We also give the results of our experimentation to assess the quality of such an annotation.