Issues in linking a thesaurus of Macedonian and Thracian gastronomy with the Langual system

As part of our project entitled “GRE-Taste: The Taste of Greece,” we have been developing a trilingual (Greek, English and Russian) thesaurus of food served in restaurants in Eastern Macedonia and Thrace. To this end, we have designed a web thesaurus development environment, and have defined facets and subfacets corresponding to the following major categories: Foods (both as ingredients and as dishes); drinks; food sources (and parts thereof); places of origin; preparation methods; functions; state; and, nutrition. For each concept, the preferred (most common) and non-preferred (synonym and hidden) terms are entered; nutritional, cultural and other information appear in separate fields, as do the relationships between concepts (e.g. between a dish and its ingredients, cooking methods or place of origin). In this paper, we examine how the Langual thesaurus can be used to code foods, and as well as the issues involved in the process, such as those related to confusing descriptions and the absence of corresponding Greek dishes. We offer a suggestion for the enrichment of the Langual thesaurus aimed at producing an outcome that might ensure harmonization and interoperability among different applications. We also put forth a proposal that might help resolve Greek terminology challenges encountered in the description and classification process of foods and also regarding issues that arise related to other gastronomic concepts.