Tools for the Milk Genome & Human Health

Knowledge Management for the Milk Genome
One of the key objectives of nutritionists and food scientists alike is to be able to identify the functional aspects of food as they relate to health and disease.  Milk is an important model food, both because the body produces it, and because it is the only food that we know of that can sustain life in singularity.  The process of determining these functionalities involves the production, curation, interoperability, mining, and analysis of large amounts of heterogeneous data.  Once data from a given subset has been made semantically interoperable with other datasets, we can derive knowledge from its propositional constructs.  This knowledge can be accessed from various stakeholders, regardless of their field of training.  We present a suite of tools that can be used to construct and curate the Milk Genome knowledge repository, while at the same time, providing accessibility and browse-ability to novice users.  We further identify the need for new ontological domains, which will reduce the ambiguity of the knowledge represented in the system.  Finally, we make some recommendations for the knowledge building process as it relates to milk, its functional genome, and its impact on health.  The presentation will close with an open discussion about some of the priorities that researchers have identified as “need to know.”