SAFE NUSANTARA: A semi-automatic framework for engineering and populating a Nusantara Food Ontology

Constructing a comprehensive food ontology, particularly for culturally diverse cuisines like Southeast East Asian (Nusantara), is hindered by the variability of online recipes and the scarcity of structured data. This research introduces SAFE Nusantara, a novel semi-automated system designed to build and populate a Nusantara food ontology by extracting relevant terms from diverse online sources in Indonesian and Malaysian languages. By leveraging a combination of techniques, including topic modelling, natural language processing, and knowledge graph techniques, SAFE Nusantara addresses the challenges of data format diversity and language specificity. The system has demonstrated significant improvements in the accuracy of food classification and has the potential to enhance food recommendation systems and cultural heritage preservation efforts.