LANGUAL
The International Framework for Food Description
LanguaL is a Food Description Thesaurus
LanguaL stands for "Langua aLimentaria" or "language of food". It is an automated method for describing, capturing and retrieving data about food. The work on LanguaL was started in the late 1970's by the Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition (CFSAN) of the United States Food and Drug Administration as an ongoing co-operative effort of specialists in food technology, information science and nutrition.
Since then, LanguaL has been developed in collaboration with the US National Cancer Institute (NCI), and, more recently, its European partners, notably in France, Denmark, Switzerland and Hungary. Since 1996, the European LanguaL Technical Committee has administered the thesaurus.
The thesaurus provides a standardised language for describing foods, specifically for classifying food products for information retrieval. LanguaL is based on the concept that:
- Any food (or food product) can be systematically described by a combination of characteristics
- These characteristics can be categorised into viewpoints and coded for computer processing
- The resulting viewpoint/characteristic codes can be used to retrieve data about the food from external databases
LanguaL is a multilingual thesaural system using facetted classification. Each food is described by a set of standard, controlled terms chosen from facets characteristic of the nutritional and/or hygienic quality of a food, as for example the biological origin, the methods of cooking and conservation, and technological treatments.
One problem concerning multilingual thesauri is the multiplicity of natural languages: corresponding terms of different languages are not always semantically equivalent. It was chosen to render LanguaL language-independent, to be used in the USA and Europe for numeric data banks on food composition (nutrients and contaminants), food consumption and legislation. Each descriptor is identified by a unique code pointing to equivalent terms in different languages (e.g. Danish, English, French, German, Italian, Spanish and Hungarian).
LanguaL thus facilitates links to many different food data banks and contributes to coherent data exchange. LanguaL is the only generally recognised method in common use for describing, capturing and retrieving data about food, adapted to computerised national and international food composition and consumption databanks.
New version 2008 of the LanguaL thesaurus
The new version of the LanguaL thesaurus, LanguaL 2008, was released 30 July 2008. The new version of the LanguaL 2008 thesaurus includes a multilingual thesaurus in Danish, English, French, German, Italian and Spanish. For more information on the LanguaL 2008 thesaurus, see Literature.
An updated version of the LanguaL Food Product Indexer will be released shortly after a minor correction.
More than 25 000 European foods LanguaL indexed
In addition to the may thousand American foods that have been LanguaL indexed
in the 1990'es, more that 25000 foods in European food composition databases are
now LanguaL indexed to facilitate search and retrieval in the context of the
EuroFIR eSearch facilities. For more information about EuroFIR, see
EuroFIR's website.
LanguaL 2007 ISO Object Identifier (OID)* for Health Level Seven
Health Level Seven is one of several American National Standards Institute (ANSI) - accredited Standards Developing Organizations (SDOs) operating in the healthcare arena.
In order to use the LanguaL thesaurus system concepts in the Health Level Seven (HL7, http://www.hl7.org/) electronic messages, an OID (Object Identifier) from HL7 OID registry is required.
LanguaL has obtained the following HL7 OID: 2.16.840.1.113883.4.291.
*) An OID is a globally unique string representing an ISO (International Organization for Standardization) identifier in a form that consists only of numbers and dots (e.g., "2.16.840.1.113883.4.291"). According to ISO, OIDs are paths in a tree structure, with the left-most number representing the root and the right-most number representing a leaf.
LanguaL 2007 Thesaurus
The latest version of the LanguaL thesaurus is the version 2007. The corresponding documentation is available in the Literature Section. Three new reports are available: one on the LanguaL 2007 Thesaurus, one on Changes from the previous version, and a new multilingual LanguaL 2007 Thesaurus (en-da-fr).
The documents are also available together with electronic files in the LanguaL Downloads section.
LanguaL is maintained by the EuroFIR Consortium under the EU 6th Framework Food Quality and Safety Programme (Contract No. FP6-513944).
This web site is hosted by Danish Food Information. Updated
2008-10-18.