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

Unhealthy diets are a major modifiable risk factor for noncommunicable diseases and the leading cause of morbidity and mortality world-wide. Nutrition assessment is crucial for understanding and preventing unhealthy diets, but often relies on self-reporting, which is burdensome, error-prone, and ineffective for long-term tracking. Digital receipts from loyalty cards, enriched with product nutrition information, offer a promising alternative. Current regulations support user-consented access to such receipts and mandates food nutrition information provision, creating a viable legislative foundation for sharing and using digital receipts. Shared ontologies enable consistent management and exchange of digital receipts and food product information across sources and applications. Yet, no current ontology describes enriched digital receipts at product and basket levels with detailed nutrition metrics. We present NutriLink, an ontology connecting digital receipts to product nutrition information and structured dietary recommendations. NutriLink supports evaluating nutritional quality of purchases within and across baskets and delivering structured dietary recommendations. It integrates with the established ontologies, including FoodOn, GoodRelations, and AGROVOC, as well as with schema.org concepts. We demonstrate NutriLink’s value through deployment in a fully automated dietary counseling system with 76 users. NutriLink is freely and openly available for research and practice.