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Managing Food Supply Chain is a hot topic, which includes several phases and transactions from food manufacturing by processing and dissemination up to consumption. Food Supply Chain management differs from other types of Supply Chain. It needs to ensure adequate safety and quality of shipped products (Herding & Mönch, 2016; Jachimczyk et al., 2021).
The ability to connect and communicate information across the supply chain is a critical success factor for a traceability system (Hastig & Sodhi, 2020). The concepts connected to any business or product domain can be shared in numerous application settings, and domain-specific information can be further extended, due to the use of ontologies .
The Semantic Web, the third generation of internet technology, is used to transform the web into a database. It comes to make machine-understandable. Semantic web technology is used to upgrade the back end of the web, after a decade of focus on the front end. The Semantic web is defined by Tim Berners Lee as a “read-write execute” web. It indicates the creation of high-quality content. It is used to represent content using formal semantics through ontologies which are considered the main components of the semantic web (Hitzler, 2021; Jain, 2021).
The concept of “Knowledge representation” means the ways of modeling knowledge about a specific domain. Ontologies are used to represent, share, and reuse knowledge. In knowledge representation, the description of the classes, subclasses, and relationships between the classes and subclasses are introduced (França et al., 2021). Web Ontology Language (OWL) is considered an important component of the Semantic Web technology stack, which contains RDF, RDFS, and SPARQL. OWL as a Semantic Web language is designed to represent complex and rich knowledge about the specific domains and is integrated with RDF. OWL is composed of OWL Lite, OWL DL, and OWL Full as three increasingly expressive sublanguages (Adedugbe et al., 2020). It is used to support many reasoning services. Reasoning means processing explicit knowledge to infer new knowledge. There are different motivations that require food traceability containing participants' variation and their standards, methods, and tools; the difficulty of exposing internal operations' information; there is no common understanding of stages in a food supply chain; and lack of data integration. Ontology plays a crucial role to solve the traceability challenges by representing a shared understanding of the food supply chain among participants (Ameri et al., 2020; Lu & Xu, 2017).
The main goal of this paper is to introduce the comprehensive Food Supply Chain (FSC) domain ontology as a knowledge model due to its importance in the economy including four stages: extracting raw materials, food production, food transportation, and food products distribution. It is determined according to the analysis of the food supply chain management and feedback from experts in the food industry. The proposed ontology provides a base for improving product quality, optimization, visibility, and sustainability. The METHONTOLOGY as a general methodology framework is used to develop the FSC ontology. In the time of a pandemic, the proposed ontology will be critical. It allows for the tracking of the entire food supply chain from the field to the consumer.