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ENABLING TRACEABILITY IN AGRI-FOOD SUPPLY CHAINS USING AN ONTOLOGICAL APPROACH

Published

Author(s)

Evan K. Wallace, Farhad Ameri, Reid Yoder

Abstract

Traceability of food products to their sources is critical for quick responses to a food emergency. US law now requires stakeholders in the agri-food supply chain to support traceabil-ity by tracking food materials they acquire and sell. However, having complete and consistent information needed to quickly investigate sources and identify affected material has proven difficult. There are multiple reasons that make food traceability a challenging task including diversity of stakeholders and their lexicons, standards, tools and methods; unwillingness to expose information of internal operations; lack of a common understanding of steps in a supply chain; and incompleteness of data. Ontologies can address the traceability challenge by creat-ing a shared understanding of the traceability model across stakeholders in a food supply chain. They can also support semantic mediation, data integration, and data exploration. This paper reports an on ongoing effort aimed at developing a formal ontology for supply chain traceability using use cases and data from partners in the bulk grain domain. The developed ontolo-gy was validated in VocBench environment through creating RDF triples from real datasets and executing SPARQL queries corresponding to predefined competency questions.
Proceedings Title
Proceedings of the ASME 2020 International Design Engineering Technical Conferences & Computers and Information in Engineering
Conference. Volume 9: 40th Computers and Information in Engineering Conference (CIE).
Conference Dates
August 17-19, 2020
Conference Location
St Louis, MO

Keywords

traceability, ontology, supply chain, interoperability, critical tracking event

Citation

Wallace, E. , Ameri, F. and Yoder, R. (2020), ENABLING TRACEABILITY IN AGRI-FOOD SUPPLY CHAINS USING AN ONTOLOGICAL APPROACH, Proceedings of the ASME 2020 International Design Engineering Technical Conferences & Computers and Information in Engineering Conference. Volume 9: 40th Computers and Information in Engineering Conference (CIE). , St Louis, MO, [online], https://doi.org/10.1115/DETC2020-22672 (Accessed October 16, 2024)

Issues

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Created November 2, 2020, Updated December 31, 2020