NutriLink: An Ontology for Linking Digital Receipts to Food Nutrition Information and Dietary Recommendations

Digital receipts from loyalty cards have created new research possibilities, particularly when enriched with product information such as nutrition details of food products. Current regulations allow access to digital receipts with users’ consent and mandate food information provision, providing a solid legislative foundation for sharing and using digital receipts in nutrition-related studies and beyond. Building on this foundation, shared ontologies can facilitate the effective management and exchange of digital receipts and food product information from various sources for diverse applications. While several ontologies are available for describing food products or digital receipts individually, an ontology that can describe enriched digital receipts at product and basket levels, including detailed nutrition metrics, is missing today. In this paper, we present NutriLink, an ontology that links digital receipts to comprehensive nutrition details of recorded products, and further to structured dietary recommendations. This permits evaluating food purchase quality at the basket level and across baskets, enabling provisioning of structured dietary recommendations to users. The NutriLink ontology is further linked to established ontologies (FoodOn,GoodRelations and AGROVOC) and to schema.org concepts for enhanced interoperability. We showcase the value of NutriLink through its role in powering a fully automated diet counseling system. This system is currently active, utilized by a maximum of almost 100 individuals in a controlled study. NutriLink is freely and openly available, offering a structured and standardized knowledge base to researchers, practitioners—including healthcare professionals—in nutrition and related fields.