- Email: [email protected]
Development of a food safety information database for Greater China
Accepted Manuscript Development of a Food Safety Information Database for Greater China Shanquan Chen, Dandan Huang, Wenyan Nong, Hoi Shan Kwan PII:
S0956-7135(16)30002-0
DOI:
10.1016/j.foodcont.2016.01.002
Reference:
JFCO 4812
To appear in:
Food Control
Received Date: 8 August 2015 Revised Date:
24 December 2015
Accepted Date: 3 January 2016
Please cite this article as: Chen S., Huang D., Nong W. & Kwan H.S., Development of a Food Safety Information Database for Greater China, Food Control (2016), doi: 10.1016/j.foodcont.2016.01.002. This is a PDF file of an unedited manuscript that has been accepted for publication. As a service to our customers we are providing this early version of the manuscript. The manuscript will undergo copyediting, typesetting, and review of the resulting proof before it is published in its final form. Please note that during the production process errors may be discovered which could affect the content, and all legal disclaimers that apply to the journal pertain.
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1. Title: Development of a Food Safety Information Database for Greater China
Shanquan Chen 1, 2, [email protected]
Dandan Huang 1, [email protected]
Wenyan Nong 1, [email protected]
Hoi Shan Kwan 1,
[email protected]
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2. Author:
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The School of Life Sciences, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shatin, NT, Hong Kong SAR, The People's Republic of China Present address: The School of Humanities & Social Science, The Chinese University of Hong Kong (Shenzhen), Longgang District, Shenzhen, The People’s Republic of China
Hoi Shan Kwan
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3. Corresponding author:
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[email protected], [email protected], [email protected];
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Rm 288, Science Centre, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shatin, NT, Hong Kong SAR, The People's Republic of China
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Development of a Food Safety Information Database for Greater China Abstract
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Food safety in China has become a major research interest and popular social issue in recent years. We have constructed a database-website-advanced search engine system for continuous collection online food safety information and efficient mass literature analysis. This paper will introduce the methods used for data extraction, processing, search and intelligent result analyses. Over 1,300,000 pieces of entry have been collected, including the information from the websites of government agencies, the abstracts of academic papers and news in credible online media. This system can catalog the search results automatically in terms of geographic region, time period, original sources and food-related keywords. An application is shown through comparing the differences between food-borne disease data in governmental documents and media reports. The number of food poisoning incidents reported by the China Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) decreased gradually from 2006 to 2012 whereas the number of food poisoning news items increased simultaneously with the food safety news. The media prefer to report the food safety incidents caused by man-made hazards or those which occur in the public domain.
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1. Introduction
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During the past decade, the occurrence of food safety issues, such as adulteration, additive violation and microbiological contamination, has become more frequent and the influence range has increased exponentially with the globalization of food chains. China has been in the center of this vortex for many years because of its recurrent scandals. The notorious incidents include melamine-adulterated milk products in 2008 which led to the death of six infants, reproduced stale meat from the Chinese unit of the OSI Group which serves many international fast-food chains, and ditch oil; these scandals frequently make headline news. With the increasing volume of food exports, Chinese food safety issues have not just impaired the health of the domestic population but also caused deep concern around the world. Scientists, officials, industries, teachers and the public are all demanding comprehensive food safety information of Greater China.
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Unlike the environmental toxins or unintended infectious agents in developed countries, China’s food safety contaminations are mainly caused by illegal chemical additives introduced intentionally (The Lancet, 2014). In order to analyze them and ensure prevention, it is critical to review the information about previous incidents, known problematic ingredients and detection methods. Van de Brug, Lucas Luijckx, Cnossen and Houben (2014) analyzed scientific papers, the documents released by food safety authorities and related news to collect the information on early signals preceding the emergency of former food safety incidents. Moore, Spink and Lipp (2012) collected the scientific papers and English articles in the general media about food fraud and adulteration in order to develop a database and to analyze the data for trend identification.
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However, there has hitherto been no systematic effort to compile the information on food-safety-related knowledge available in Chinese-language news media, government sites and academic articles.
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Academic papers are a precious pool of technical information for indepth analysis and comparison. In Mainland China, the majority of scientific papers are collected into the China Knowledge Resource Integrated Database (http://www.global.cnki.net/kns50/) and can be searched through the service platform of the China National Knowledge Infrastructure (CNKI). The data from these authorities are relatively credible and practical for supervision purposes. The Chinese governmental food safety information system is very complex, and the data from the food safety authorities are scattered around the official websites of different departments. It is necessary to establish a one-step platform to integrate multi-source information from this complex system. Meanwhile, food safety news is an important source of timely information. According to the WHO, unofficial informal sources contribute more than 60% of the initial outbreak reports (WHO, 2015). Some scientists also utilized food safety reports on the internet to understand the nature of the food safety incidents which occur in China. Qiang, Wen, Jing and Yue (2011) downloaded 600 reports dating from 1st April to 30th June, 2009 to investigate different subjects by content analysis (Qiang, Wen, Jing & Yue, 2011). In 2015, four other Chinese scientists analyzed 295 food safety incident reports, which occurred in Beijing, in an internet database from 2004 to 2013 (Liu, Liu, Zhang & Gao, 2015). Such kinds of paper and tools require a large volume of relevant data. But most databases which focus on food safety news in Mainland China are edited by people without a professional background and who have not opened up their source list. These might impose an impartiality risk to the collected data.
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As a result, our laboratory established a Food Safety Information Database to collect food safety news from the websites of the listed media, information from the official websites of the governmental agencies and related abstracts from Chinese-language journals in Greater China. To collect the data continuously, the procedures are automated with the assistance of information technology. We also developed some statistical functions in the user-interface, a website, to make this system a semantic tool of information searching and analysis. This paper will introduce the method of building this database-based web system, list the source websites and demonstrate how to use them. Then, we will compare the food-poisoning data in governmental documents and in media reports to illustrate a new application.
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2. Materials and Methodology
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Initially, the scope of the target information was defined by a list of food safety websites in Greater China. The technique of web-crawler and Solr, open source software, were used to extract the raw data and index them after processing. In order to search and classify the collected information, a comprehensive list of food-safety-related keywords were consolidated from three glossaries in different fields. The number of keywords which appeared in each record was counted and stored in the database with the content. Furthermore, a website was built by using Java-script as the user interface, and a serial of plug-ins were developed based on the 2
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results of the keyword statistics. Content analysis can be conducted on the collected data to characterize the pattern of published food safety information by calculating the keyword frequency and generating the tendency profile automatically.
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2.1 Source Identification
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The extracted information contains some technical terms, so we constructed an inhouse glossary related to food science and safety to make the segmentation more precise. This inhouse glossary has 51,621 keywords. It contains the words from “A Glossary of Food Science and Technology”, “Glossary of Biotechnology for Food and Agriculture” and the keywords in
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The relevancy of collected information is guaranteed by the source websites. The food safety expert in our laboratory defined 106 websites as the information source of this Food Safety Database. They consist of three groups: the websites of governmental agencies in Greater China; the Chinese literature platform CNKI; and the media. The official food safety information system in China is complex. Initially, the food safety supervision system included the State Council’s Food Safety Committee, the Ministry of Health (MOH), the State Food and Drug Administration Department (SFDA), the Ministry of Agriculture (MOA), the Industry and Commerce Department (IAC) and the Administration of Quality Supervision, Inspection and Quarantine Department (AQSIQ). In March 2013, reformation and functions among these departments was re-organized to simplify the system and to define their responsibility. The departments involved were consolidated into the China Food and Drug Administration (CFDA), the National Health and Family Planning Commission (NHFPC), MOA, AQSIQ and the State Administration for Industry and Commerce Department (SAIC). Moreover, the state and local food safety networks were merged into the food safety information system. The local level consisted of a hierarchy of three tiers of governments: provinces; cities; and counties (Jia & Jukes, 2013). The state administrations publish information with national impact, and the local administrative agencies announce the information within their geographic jurisdictions. China has 34 provincial administrative regions, but some of them do not have official websites, and the situation is even worse at the city level. The governmental agency group contains 54 websites both at the central and the local level, including the official websites of the supervision bodies, the affiliate websites for information communication and the websites of related institutions. There is one source in the academic group, CNKI, for the collection of academic abstracts. The rest of the related websites are categorized into the media group. We considered three kinds of websites as credible and/or valuable. The first is the websites written or edited by people with a food science or food safety background, including the official websites of the food research institutions and bloggers of famous food scientists. The second is the websites for the industry practitioners, such as the websites of the industry associations and the related companies. The third is the food or health columns of the portals and mainstream media which cover the news read by most people. Table A lists the source websites of this database-website system.
2.2 Data Extraction, Processing and Storage
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We deployed the technique of web-crawler to extract all information from the source website for information completeness. The raw data are duplicated from the identified data sources and the characters of each record are identified, including the title, source, publication date and URL. The content and characters of the processed data are stored in a database established with MySQL. The open-source software Solr can provide a full-text search and a replicate index. It imports records from the database, segments them into words by MMSeg4j, filters out the stop words and indexes the rest of the segmented words.
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“throwing out the window net”. Chau and Kwan (2005) compiled “A glossary of Food Science and Technology” which covers over 20,000 food-related terms with their Chinese translation used in Mainland, Taiwan and Hong Kong. These terms are from the areas of raw materials, processing, food hygiene, micro-organisms, nutrition, chemistry, food science analysis and additives. Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) consolidated the terms and acronyms that are regularly used in the biotechnology for food and agriculture in “Glossary of Biotechnology for Food and Agriculture” (FAO, Ma & Zhao, 2011). We added the second edition with its Chinese translations both in simplified and traditional Chinese. Moreover, there is a food safety incidents database called “throwing out the window net” (http://www.zccw.info/) in China. It was developed by a group of volunteers in 2012 and it contains more than 3,000 pieces of Chinese news about food contamination (Liu et al., 2015). The website editors have identified the food name and incident cause for each record and then published them online. We put these keywords into our dictionary for the recognition of common terms in the news from the general media. The frequencies of all glossary words in each record are calculated and stored for content analysis.
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2.3 Search Procedure and Advanced Search Function
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3. Results and Discussion
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3.1 Database-website System and Use Demonstration
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To improve the efficiency of information searching, a search website was developed as the user interface by Java-script. When a user enters a word, the request will be sent to Solr and related records will be returned in Json. The result priority can be ranked according to the published date or the relativity calculated by the score function in Solr. To help users analyze the content and narrow down the scope of the search result, we developed a series of statistical functions to automatically generate the time trend, source website contribution, geographic distribution and food keyword frequency. The time trend and source website contribution are based on the general characters extracted during data collection. The number of the administrative unit names in China, including the provinces and cities in each result record, was counted and added up for geographic distribution. The words in our glossary are comprehensive and they relate to food science and safety. The total frequency of each word in the result can reflect the correlation strength between this word and the keyword the user searched for. The keyword entered by users is also recorded for word cloud generation. Figure A is the workflow chart of this database-website system.
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To unearth prominent information in the masses of text, we built a filter for the user who searches food safety information about Hong Kong. The principle is to weigh the information of different regions in accordance with their food volumes imported by Hong Kong. Based on the food import data from the Census and Statistics Department of Hong Kong Government in 2012, the information about regions with larger importing volume is ranked in front.
The Food Safety Information Database for Greater China is both a database and a website-analytical platform with the link http://kwanlab.bio.cuhk.edu.hk:8080/FS/. The website is primarily displayed in Chinese. Users can choose their preferred language through the option box “Select Language” in the webpage header and the whole page will then be translated by Google. Non-Chinese and even non-English users can comprehend the general idea of the 4
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articles with the assistance of Google Translate. Figure B is the Chinese version and Google-translated English version of the homepage. Users can search their topic of interest by entering a keyword into the search box. Because our inhouse food glossary includes the English, Simplified Chinese and Traditional Chinese versions of food terms, the search system will provide the translations of the user’s inquiry in a section called Keyword Translate in the left column, provided that the searched term is in the glossary. To date, more than 1,300,000 pieces of food safety information have been collected from between 1979 and 2015. Table B summarizes the number of source websites, total entries and keywords in our glossary on 7th June, 2015. The search results are displayed in the “Search Results” tab of the data page. The default data priority is based on the published date, but users can rank them according to the relevancy by choosing “Relevance” in the first option box beside “Sort by”. After clicking on the title of an item, the system will direct to the original page of this entry for data extension.
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The statistical information of a search result is listed in the “Statistical Analysis” section on the data page. It has the frequency ranking of sources, keywords, years and locations. The keywords in our glossary are classified in accordance with the number of characters in Chinese, including two-, three-, four-, five- and multi-characters (translated as one word by Google) keywords. Users can utilize these rankings to search sub-topic information by clicking on the keyword they are interested in and then choosing “添加” (Add to) to limit the search results. The corresponding keyword in English is provided to assist non-English users searching English data by clicking on the interested keyword in the list which is to the left of the area of resulting information. The number of result records published in a specific year is shown in the frequency column of “发布日期” (Release date), and a line chart is displayed in years in the middle of statistical analysis section. Meanwhile, the resulting information can be sorted in terms of geography. We have also created a China map to visually illustrate the number of result records with regard to different provinces. The color depth indicates the relative number of result records about different provinces, and the number of specific provinces will be shown when the cursor is placed on it. Moreover, a user can search the keyword in primary search engines, such as Google and Wikipedia, for information extension through the “Further Reading” column in the lower left corner of the data page.
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This database-website system is a semantic tool to help users to find the relevant information quickly. We will demonstrate how to use it through answering the question “which city’s information is contributing most to the media reports about milk”. The user can enter the word “奶” (milk) into the search box, set the type of “News” to search the media reports related to milk. Figure C shows the Chinese version and the Google-translated English version of some statistic information about “奶” search result. Because the database is continuously updated, the results and frequency statistics may vary at different enquiry times. Hong Kong is the most frequently mentioned city in the media reports, and 2013 was the year when most of the reports were released. “Protein” is an important concept in milk which also ranks in front in the keyword statistics. Adding “Protein”, by choosing the “添加” (Add to) option, will decrease the number of result records from 21,439 to 2,953 in two clicks. Excluding the records containing “Protein” from the search results or starting a new search of “Protein” can be easily achieved by choosing “排除” (Exclude) or “搜索” (Search for) after clicking. These functions allow an easy customized search.
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Users can select keywords from the “Word Cloud” on the home page to start a search, and the size of each keyword is based on the number of times which the users have entered it. In the webpage header of the home page, there is a function called “One Week News” to quickly view the news released last week. The linkages to other food safety websites are also provided in “Related Links”. Figure D summarizes the functions on the website and categorizes them into two groups, namely, the semantic analysis of the interested topic and exploration.
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3.2 An Example of Comparing Food Poisoning Data from Different Stakeholders
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This database system collects information from various sources, so that it can serve as complementary data to the authority statistics. The food poisoning data from the government and the media in our database are used as an example for comparison. Food poisoning data from the Chinese government is published mainly by the China CDC. It uses the National Disease Report System to collect the information about food poisoning incidents, and it publishes a statistical report on the official website every season. The information includes the annual number of food poisoning incidents, the percentage of incidents caused by different food hazards and the number of incidents which happened in four implicated locations. We assembled the data in the reports of the China CDC between 2006 and 2012 and then calculated the average values to picture the characteristics of the food poisoning incidents which were reported by the authorities. The media are an essential force in shaping consumers’ perceptions. There are many studies about food adulteration news on the internet whereas researchers are not usually interested in food poisoning cases. We used the keywords “食品中毒” and “食物中毒” (food poisoning) with the article type “News” to search the food poisoning reports from the media and we found 6,701 records in the database, from 2006 to 2012.
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The number of food poisoning incidents reported by the China CDC decreased gradually from 596 in 2006 to 174 in 2012. During the same period, the number of media reports about food poisoning increased from 254 to 1,797 in 2011 and then it reduced to 1,566 in 2012. It shares the same trend with the number of food safety reports in our database, which grew from 2006, peaked in 2011 and then decreased in 2012. Figure E shows the number of food poisoning incidents reported by the China CDC, food poisoning news and food safety news in the Food Safety Database. The number of food poisoning news items changes simultaneously with the number of food safety news items, and the relationship between them should therefore be further analyzed.
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The distributions of implicated locations and causes are different between the food poisoning incidents reported by the China CDC and by the media in our database. The column chart on the left of Figure F shows the percentage of the four implicated locations, and the one on the right shows the percentage of the different causes. Home and school/company cafeterias are the top two locations in the authority data whereas school/company cafeterias and restaurants are the two most frequently mentioned locations in the news. For the implicated causes of food poisoning incidents, there are more news items about man-made chemical hazards and without clearly defined causes.
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The objective of establishing this database-website system is to assist scientists and authorities, especially the ones not familiar with the food safety information system in Greater China, to assess the information about food safety issues, analyze the data, identify the trends and make comparisons in an effective manner. First, this database-website system adopted a web-crawling technique and it extracted a large volume of information in various sectors of food safety. The primary method of collecting related information is to assemble raw data, code filter by hand and store them in a database (Baldi & Mantovani, 2008; Moore, Spink & Lipp, 2012). For instance, Jakszyn et al. (2004) developed a database of nitrosamines, heterocyclic amines and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons based on 139 references from 1980 to 2003. But the total volume of food safety information is huge and it is growing at a tremendous pace. The traditional assembling method, which is labor-intensive, will limit data volume and lead to the slow update of timely information. We therefore used a web-crawler to collect information automatically, and as a result more than 1,300,000 entries, from 1979 to 2015, have been extracted into our Database. In addition, the majority of human-compiled databases concentrate on a specific topic and the scope of their data is narrow. To satisfy the needs of different users, we extracted all the information from source websites for completeness and then constructed a comprehensive food glossary to improve the precision of information searching.
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3.3 The Significance of the Food Safety Information Database for Greater China
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Our database is an important pool of food safety information with high relevancy and credibility. It is the first one-step platform to assess the food safety information from the central and local authorities. With the peer-reviewed academic papers in the CNKI, users can obtain the solid scientific background of the current and emerging food safety risks to aid risk assessment. Our database is also a collection of credible online food safety news. In Mainland China, the massive media reports are disordered and some are malicious. The articles from the mainstream media and professional third-party websites are of a relatively high quality and they can be used for risk communication. We hand-picked these websites to improve their relevancies, which makes the extracted data representative of online food safety information in Greater China.
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In addition to the qualified data, this food safety database also helps users to find relevant information in a mass of text. It offers a wide spectrum of possibilities from simple keywords to complex advanced searches. Compared with the traditional search engines, which give a long list of miscellaneous reports, the statistical functions on our website allow users to reduce the big initial result to a smaller set of relevant articles in one click. More importantly, it is a semantic tool for trends identification and content analysis. Mining the information from a search engine demands time-consuming screening and categorization. The search results in our system are classified, when acquired, in terms of time periods, original sources, geographic regions and food keywords frequency. The system helps users to get an overview of data trends, relevant sources, geographic distribution and hot keywords in seconds. With these functions, we have shown that the number of food poisoning news items changes simultaneously with the number of food safety news items.
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Finally, this database is an open system by which users can explore food safety information. “One Week News” displays the news released last week and “Word Cloud” reflects the keyword popularity among our users. The ranking of keyword frequency connects a user’s enquiry with the concepts in different fields, including food safety, food production, testing, nutrition and biotechnology. These functions aim to provide new insights to users in exploration. The limitation of the Food Safety Information Database for Greater China is the change of source website. During the past three years, about 16% of these websites have shut down or changed their addresses and some new websites have gone online. The team in our laboratory maintains continuous attention until the food safety information system reaches a relatively stable stage on the internet.
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4. Conclusion
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The analysis and prevention of food safety issues require a large amount of information about regulation, supervision, detection methods and previous cases. Our laboratory established the first food safety database-website system to collect online information continuously from the authorities, academics and public media in Greater China. Over 1,300,000 pieces of entry have been extracted by web-crawler from 106 selected sources which have high relevancy and credibility. These data cover a wide spectrum of areas and can be used by non-Chinese audiences with the assistance of Google Translate. In addition to providing tremendous qualified information, this database-website system also aims to improve the efficiency of searching and analysis. A comprehensive food glossary and a keyword-frequency counting technique are adopted to make intelligent content analyses. The website functions classify the results in terms of the geographic regions, time periods, original sources and food-related keywords. It can aid the audience in identifying trends, discovering the hub, revealing the hot spots in different fields and making indepth content analyses.
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This database-website system is useful in reviewing previous food safety issues, understanding the current conditions and developing tools for prevention. Moreover, three data source categories make it an open system for users to not just explore the food safety information within one group, but also to compare the ones from different stakeholders.
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5. Acknowledgements
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The research is supported by the Knowledge Transfer Project Fund KTP111206f37, from The Chinese University of Hong Kong.
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6. References
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Baldi, F., & Mantovani, A. (2008). A new database for food safety: EDID (Endocrine disrupting 8
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chemicals - Diet Interaction Database). Ann Ist Super Sanità, Vol. 44, No. 1: 57–63. Retrieved from http://www.iss.it/publ/anna/2008/1/44157.pdf
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Chau, C.F., & Kwan, H.S. (2005). A Glossary of Food Science and Technology. Retrieved April 3, 2015, from http://cup.columbia.edu/book/a-glossary-of-food-science-and-technology/9789629960926
FAO, Ma, X., & Zhao, J. (2011). Agricultural Biotechnologies: About the glossary. Retrieved April 3, 2015, from http://www.fao.org/biotech/biotech-glossary/about-glossary/en/
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Jakszyn, P., Agudo, A., Ibanez, R., Garcia-Closas, R., Pera, G., Amiano, P. & Gonzalez, C. A. (2004). Development of a Food Database of Nitrosamines, Heterocyclic Amines, and Polycyclic Aromatic Hydrocarbons. J. Nutr., 134(8), 2011–2014. Retrieved from http://jn.nutrition.org/content/134/8/2011.full
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Jia, C., & Jukes, D. (2013). The national food safety control system of China – A systematic review. Food Control, 32(1), 236–245. doi:10.1016/j.foodcont.2012.11.042
Liu, Y., Liu, F., Zhang, J., & Gao, J. (2015). Insights into the nature of food safety issues in Beijing through content analysis of an Internet database of food safety incidents in China. Food Control, 51, 206–211. doi:10.1016/j.foodcont.2014.11.017 Moore, J. C., Spink, J., & Lipp, M. (2012). Development and application of a database of food ingredient fraud and economically motivated adulteration from 1980 to 2010. Journal of Food Science, 77(4), R118–26. doi:10.1111/j.1750-3841.2012.02657.x
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Qiang, L., Wen, L., Jing, W., & Yue, D. (2011). Application of content analysis in food safety reports on the Internet in China. Food Control, 22(2), 252–256. doi:10.1016/j.foodcont.2010.07.005 The Lancet. (2014). China’s food safety: a continuing global problem. Lancet, 384(9941), 377. doi:10.1016/S0140-6736(14)61266-6
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Van de Brug, F. J., Lucas Luijckx, N. B., Cnossen, H. J., & Houben, G. F. (2014). Early signals for emerging food safety risks: From past cases to future identification. Food Control, 39, 75– 86. doi:10.1016/j.foodcont.2013.10.038
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WHO. (2015). WHO | Epidemic intelligence - systematic event detection. Retrieved April 23, 2015, from http://www.who.int/csr/alertresponse/epidemicintelligence/en/
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Appendices
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Table A. The source website list of the Food Safety Information Database for Greater China Serial no.
Website Address
Website
Ministry of Agriculture of the People's Republic of China China Agricultural Information Network
http://www.moa.gov.cn/
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State Administration for Industry & Commerce of the People's Republic of China
http://www.saic.gov.cn/
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Ministry of Health of the People's Republic of China National Health and Family Planning Commission of the People's Republic of China
http:// www.moh.gov.cn
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CFDA
http://www.sfda.gov.cn/WS01/CL0001/
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SFDA Receiving Center Matters and Complaints
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12331 Complaint Website for Food and Drug
www.12331.org.cn
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China National Center for Food Safety Risk Assessment
http://www.chinafoodsafety.net/
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National Food Safety Information Center
http://www.fsi.gov.cn/
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of
http://www.agri.gov.cn/
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http://www.nhfpc.gov.cn/
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Governmental Agency Group
Administrative
www.sfdaccr.org.cn
China Food Safety Web
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National Institutes for Food and Drug Control
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Food Safety Database for China (till 2008)
http://www.fsr.org.cn/
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China CDC
http://www.chinacdc.cn/
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Legislative Affair Office of the State Council P.R. China General Administration of Quality Supervision, Inspection and Quarantine of the People's Republic of China
http://www.chinalaw.gov.cn/
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National Food Quality Safety Law Enforcement & Supervision & Inquiry-service Information System
http://www.nfqs.com.cn/
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Taiwan FDA
http://www.fda.gov.tw/TC/index.aspx
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http://www.cfs.gov.cn/cmsweb/webportal
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http://www.nicpbp.org.cn/CL0001/
http://www.aqsiq.gov.cn/
Center for Food Safety in HKSRA
http://www.cfs.gov.hk/
Center for Health Protection in HKSRA
www.chp.gov.hk
Department of Health in HKSRA
www.dh.gov.hk
Sichuan FDA
http://www.scfda.gov.cn/CL2272/
Shanxi FDA
http://www.shxda.gov.cn
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Shanxi Food Safety Network
http://www.sxfs.gov.cn/
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Shanxi FDA
http://www.sxfs.gov.cn/
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Fujian CDC
http://www.fjcdc.com.cn/
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Fujian FDA
http://www.fjfda.gov.cn
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Fujian Food Safety Information Web
http://www.spqs.cn/
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FDA in Fujian Province
www.fjfda.gov.cn
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Hubei Food and Drug Administration
www.hubfda.gov.cn
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Hubei FDA
http://www.hubfda.gov.cn/
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Disclosure of Food Safety Information in the Government of Hubei Province
http://www.hubei.gov.cn/zwgk/zdlyxxgk/spaqxxgk/
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Hubei CDC
http://www.hbcdc.cn/
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Hebei Food Safety Web
http://www.hebfs.gov.cn/
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Hebei CDC
http://www.hebeicdc.com/index.do?templet=index
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Guangxi CDC
http://www.gxcdc.com/
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Hainan Center for Disease Control & Prevention
www.hncdc.cn
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Food Safety Network in Hainan Province
http://fs.hifda.gov.cn/CL0044/index.html
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Information of Agriculture, Rural Areas and Farmers in Guangdong Province
www.gdcct.gov.cn
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Guangdong Food and Drug Administration
www.gdda.gov.cn
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Guangdong Food Safety Web
www.gdfs.gov.cn
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Gansu CDC
http://www.gscdc.net/
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Food Safety Network in Anhui Province
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Anhui CDC
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Jiangsu Food and Drug Administration
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Heilongjiang Food Information Network
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Heilongjiang CDC
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Jilin Food and Drug Administration
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Jilin Food Safety Web
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Liaoning Food Safety Web
http://www.lnspaq.com/
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Jiangxi Food Safety Network
http://www.jxfs.gov.cn/
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Zhejiang Food Safety Network
http://www.zjfs.gov.cn/
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Zhejiang CDC
http://www.cdc.zj.cn/bornwcms/Html/zjcdc/
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Henan CDC
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Academic Group CNKI
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http://www.hljfs.gov.cn/
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International Food Safety Association
http://www.ncpqh.com/safety/
Bureau of Biological Science and Biotechnology in Chinese Academy of Science
http://www.bio.cas.cn/
Food Safety for China
http://big5.ce.cn/gate/big5/foodsafety.ce.cn/
China Food Technology Web
http://www.tech-food.com/
China National Food Industry Association China Laws and Regulations of Foods, Drugs and Cosmetics
http://www.cnfia.cn/ http://www.chinafdc-law.com/
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Food Business Network
http://www.21food.cn/
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Chinese Food Equipment Net
http://china.foode.com.cn/
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The World of Risk Management
http://www.riskmw.com/
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The Internet of Things in Food Safety
http://www.spaqiot.com/
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Relieved Food
http://www.anxinshipin.com/
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Food Safety Web
http://www.foodsafe.net/foodsafeold/
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Food Safety in China
http://www.chinafoodsafety.net/newslist/
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Guangxi Food Safety Network
http://www.gxfsn.gov.cn/CL0215/
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Haixia Food Safety Web
http://www.cfqn12315.com/
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Shanxi Food Safety Information Network
http://www.sxspaqxx.com/
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Food Web
http://www.dashipin.com/
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Jiangsu Food Web
http://www.jiangsufood.net
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Henan Food Web
http://www.henanfood.net
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Shandong Food Web
http://www.shandongfood.net
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Shanghai Food Web
http://www.shanghaifood.net
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Liaoning Food Web
http://www.liaoningfood.net
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Beijing Food Web
http://www.bjfood.net
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Hubei Food Web
http://www.hubeifood.net
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Guangdong Food Web
http://www.guangdongfood.net
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Fujian Food Web
http://www.fujianfood.net
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Fujian Food Information Web
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Hubei Food Web
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Hebei Food Web
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Hubei Food Web
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Food Industry Association in Shandong Province
http://www.sdfood.org.cn/
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Safe Food
http://www.anxinshipin.com
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Dare to Eat
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Guoke
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Green Peace
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Aige Agriculture Web
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Agriculture Sharing Network
http://www.nx28.com/
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Technology for People's Livelihood Web
http://www.enlife.net.cn/index.htm
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China Venture Web
http://www.chinaventure.com.cn/
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Blogger of Yunbo Luo
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Blogger of Junshi Chen
http://blog.sina.com.cn/iamchenjunshi
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Blogger of Zhihong Fan
http://snowheart19.blog.sohu.com/
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Blogger of Tony Ma
http://madong910310.blog.163.com/
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http://www.ganchi.net
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http://yunboluo.blog.sohu.com/
China Food Web
http://www.cfqn.com.cn/
News of People -- Act for Food Safety
http://shipin.people.com.cn/GB/86164/220965/index.html
Health News in Sina
http://health.sina.com.cn/index.shtml
Agriculture News in Xinlang
http://nongye.sina.com.cn/
Food Channel in China Central Television
http://www.spnews.cn/
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Food News Web
http://www.chinafnews.com/
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Food News in Baidu
http://news.baidu.com/
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Health News in Sohu
http://health.sohu.com/
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Table B. The number of source websites, total entries and keywords in our glossary of the Food Safety Information Database for Greater China (Data accessed on 7th June, 2015) . Number Source website 89 * Keywords in our glossary 51,621 Entries in the database 1,309,980 Some websites are not available now due to closure or change of address
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Figure A. The workflow chart of the Food Safety Information Database for Greater China, items in brackets are the technique names
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Figure B.1 The Chinese version of the homepage of Food Safety Information Database for Greater China. B.2 The Google-translated English version of the homepage of the Food Safety Information Database for Greater China
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Figure C.1 The Chinese Version of keywords frequency rankings based on the result of searching “奶” in the Food Safety Information Database for Greater China. C.2 The Google-translated English version of keywords frequency rankings based on the result of searching “奶” in the Food Safety Information Database for Greater China
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Figure D. Functions for semantic analysis and exploration on the user interface of the Food Safety Information Database for Greater China
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Figure E. The number of food safety news items and the food poisoning news items in the Food Safety Information Database for Greater China and the food poisoning incidents reported by the China CDC
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Figure F.1 The percentage of the four implicated locations in the reports from the China CDC and news items from the Food Safety Information Database for Greater China. F.2 The percentage of different causes in the reports from the China CDC and news items from the Food Safety Information Database for Greater China
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Highlight: 1. Over 1,300,000 pieces of information were extracted by web-crawler in Greater China. 2. The in-house glossary has 51621 keywords of food, nutrition and biotechnology.
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3. Search results are grouped according to place, time, source and keyword automatically.
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4. The system can be used to compare food safety information from different stakeholders.
S0956-7135(16)30002-0
DOI:
10.1016/j.foodcont.2016.01.002
Reference:
JFCO 4812
To appear in:
Food Control
Received Date: 8 August 2015 Revised Date:
24 December 2015
Accepted Date: 3 January 2016
Please cite this article as: Chen S., Huang D., Nong W. & Kwan H.S., Development of a Food Safety Information Database for Greater China, Food Control (2016), doi: 10.1016/j.foodcont.2016.01.002. This is a PDF file of an unedited manuscript that has been accepted for publication. As a service to our customers we are providing this early version of the manuscript. The manuscript will undergo copyediting, typesetting, and review of the resulting proof before it is published in its final form. Please note that during the production process errors may be discovered which could affect the content, and all legal disclaimers that apply to the journal pertain.
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1. Title: Development of a Food Safety Information Database for Greater China
Shanquan Chen 1, 2, [email protected]
Dandan Huang 1, [email protected]
Wenyan Nong 1, [email protected]
Hoi Shan Kwan 1,
[email protected]
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2. Author:
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The School of Life Sciences, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shatin, NT, Hong Kong SAR, The People's Republic of China Present address: The School of Humanities & Social Science, The Chinese University of Hong Kong (Shenzhen), Longgang District, Shenzhen, The People’s Republic of China
Hoi Shan Kwan
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[email protected], [email protected], [email protected];
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Rm 288, Science Centre, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shatin, NT, Hong Kong SAR, The People's Republic of China
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Development of a Food Safety Information Database for Greater China Abstract
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Food safety in China has become a major research interest and popular social issue in recent years. We have constructed a database-website-advanced search engine system for continuous collection online food safety information and efficient mass literature analysis. This paper will introduce the methods used for data extraction, processing, search and intelligent result analyses. Over 1,300,000 pieces of entry have been collected, including the information from the websites of government agencies, the abstracts of academic papers and news in credible online media. This system can catalog the search results automatically in terms of geographic region, time period, original sources and food-related keywords. An application is shown through comparing the differences between food-borne disease data in governmental documents and media reports. The number of food poisoning incidents reported by the China Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) decreased gradually from 2006 to 2012 whereas the number of food poisoning news items increased simultaneously with the food safety news. The media prefer to report the food safety incidents caused by man-made hazards or those which occur in the public domain.
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1. Introduction
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During the past decade, the occurrence of food safety issues, such as adulteration, additive violation and microbiological contamination, has become more frequent and the influence range has increased exponentially with the globalization of food chains. China has been in the center of this vortex for many years because of its recurrent scandals. The notorious incidents include melamine-adulterated milk products in 2008 which led to the death of six infants, reproduced stale meat from the Chinese unit of the OSI Group which serves many international fast-food chains, and ditch oil; these scandals frequently make headline news. With the increasing volume of food exports, Chinese food safety issues have not just impaired the health of the domestic population but also caused deep concern around the world. Scientists, officials, industries, teachers and the public are all demanding comprehensive food safety information of Greater China.
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Unlike the environmental toxins or unintended infectious agents in developed countries, China’s food safety contaminations are mainly caused by illegal chemical additives introduced intentionally (The Lancet, 2014). In order to analyze them and ensure prevention, it is critical to review the information about previous incidents, known problematic ingredients and detection methods. Van de Brug, Lucas Luijckx, Cnossen and Houben (2014) analyzed scientific papers, the documents released by food safety authorities and related news to collect the information on early signals preceding the emergency of former food safety incidents. Moore, Spink and Lipp (2012) collected the scientific papers and English articles in the general media about food fraud and adulteration in order to develop a database and to analyze the data for trend identification.
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However, there has hitherto been no systematic effort to compile the information on food-safety-related knowledge available in Chinese-language news media, government sites and academic articles.
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Academic papers are a precious pool of technical information for indepth analysis and comparison. In Mainland China, the majority of scientific papers are collected into the China Knowledge Resource Integrated Database (http://www.global.cnki.net/kns50/) and can be searched through the service platform of the China National Knowledge Infrastructure (CNKI). The data from these authorities are relatively credible and practical for supervision purposes. The Chinese governmental food safety information system is very complex, and the data from the food safety authorities are scattered around the official websites of different departments. It is necessary to establish a one-step platform to integrate multi-source information from this complex system. Meanwhile, food safety news is an important source of timely information. According to the WHO, unofficial informal sources contribute more than 60% of the initial outbreak reports (WHO, 2015). Some scientists also utilized food safety reports on the internet to understand the nature of the food safety incidents which occur in China. Qiang, Wen, Jing and Yue (2011) downloaded 600 reports dating from 1st April to 30th June, 2009 to investigate different subjects by content analysis (Qiang, Wen, Jing & Yue, 2011). In 2015, four other Chinese scientists analyzed 295 food safety incident reports, which occurred in Beijing, in an internet database from 2004 to 2013 (Liu, Liu, Zhang & Gao, 2015). Such kinds of paper and tools require a large volume of relevant data. But most databases which focus on food safety news in Mainland China are edited by people without a professional background and who have not opened up their source list. These might impose an impartiality risk to the collected data.
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As a result, our laboratory established a Food Safety Information Database to collect food safety news from the websites of the listed media, information from the official websites of the governmental agencies and related abstracts from Chinese-language journals in Greater China. To collect the data continuously, the procedures are automated with the assistance of information technology. We also developed some statistical functions in the user-interface, a website, to make this system a semantic tool of information searching and analysis. This paper will introduce the method of building this database-based web system, list the source websites and demonstrate how to use them. Then, we will compare the food-poisoning data in governmental documents and in media reports to illustrate a new application.
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2. Materials and Methodology
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Initially, the scope of the target information was defined by a list of food safety websites in Greater China. The technique of web-crawler and Solr, open source software, were used to extract the raw data and index them after processing. In order to search and classify the collected information, a comprehensive list of food-safety-related keywords were consolidated from three glossaries in different fields. The number of keywords which appeared in each record was counted and stored in the database with the content. Furthermore, a website was built by using Java-script as the user interface, and a serial of plug-ins were developed based on the 2
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results of the keyword statistics. Content analysis can be conducted on the collected data to characterize the pattern of published food safety information by calculating the keyword frequency and generating the tendency profile automatically.
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2.1 Source Identification
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The extracted information contains some technical terms, so we constructed an inhouse glossary related to food science and safety to make the segmentation more precise. This inhouse glossary has 51,621 keywords. It contains the words from “A Glossary of Food Science and Technology”, “Glossary of Biotechnology for Food and Agriculture” and the keywords in
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The relevancy of collected information is guaranteed by the source websites. The food safety expert in our laboratory defined 106 websites as the information source of this Food Safety Database. They consist of three groups: the websites of governmental agencies in Greater China; the Chinese literature platform CNKI; and the media. The official food safety information system in China is complex. Initially, the food safety supervision system included the State Council’s Food Safety Committee, the Ministry of Health (MOH), the State Food and Drug Administration Department (SFDA), the Ministry of Agriculture (MOA), the Industry and Commerce Department (IAC) and the Administration of Quality Supervision, Inspection and Quarantine Department (AQSIQ). In March 2013, reformation and functions among these departments was re-organized to simplify the system and to define their responsibility. The departments involved were consolidated into the China Food and Drug Administration (CFDA), the National Health and Family Planning Commission (NHFPC), MOA, AQSIQ and the State Administration for Industry and Commerce Department (SAIC). Moreover, the state and local food safety networks were merged into the food safety information system. The local level consisted of a hierarchy of three tiers of governments: provinces; cities; and counties (Jia & Jukes, 2013). The state administrations publish information with national impact, and the local administrative agencies announce the information within their geographic jurisdictions. China has 34 provincial administrative regions, but some of them do not have official websites, and the situation is even worse at the city level. The governmental agency group contains 54 websites both at the central and the local level, including the official websites of the supervision bodies, the affiliate websites for information communication and the websites of related institutions. There is one source in the academic group, CNKI, for the collection of academic abstracts. The rest of the related websites are categorized into the media group. We considered three kinds of websites as credible and/or valuable. The first is the websites written or edited by people with a food science or food safety background, including the official websites of the food research institutions and bloggers of famous food scientists. The second is the websites for the industry practitioners, such as the websites of the industry associations and the related companies. The third is the food or health columns of the portals and mainstream media which cover the news read by most people. Table A lists the source websites of this database-website system.
2.2 Data Extraction, Processing and Storage
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We deployed the technique of web-crawler to extract all information from the source website for information completeness. The raw data are duplicated from the identified data sources and the characters of each record are identified, including the title, source, publication date and URL. The content and characters of the processed data are stored in a database established with MySQL. The open-source software Solr can provide a full-text search and a replicate index. It imports records from the database, segments them into words by MMSeg4j, filters out the stop words and indexes the rest of the segmented words.
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“throwing out the window net”. Chau and Kwan (2005) compiled “A glossary of Food Science and Technology” which covers over 20,000 food-related terms with their Chinese translation used in Mainland, Taiwan and Hong Kong. These terms are from the areas of raw materials, processing, food hygiene, micro-organisms, nutrition, chemistry, food science analysis and additives. Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) consolidated the terms and acronyms that are regularly used in the biotechnology for food and agriculture in “Glossary of Biotechnology for Food and Agriculture” (FAO, Ma & Zhao, 2011). We added the second edition with its Chinese translations both in simplified and traditional Chinese. Moreover, there is a food safety incidents database called “throwing out the window net” (http://www.zccw.info/) in China. It was developed by a group of volunteers in 2012 and it contains more than 3,000 pieces of Chinese news about food contamination (Liu et al., 2015). The website editors have identified the food name and incident cause for each record and then published them online. We put these keywords into our dictionary for the recognition of common terms in the news from the general media. The frequencies of all glossary words in each record are calculated and stored for content analysis.
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2.3 Search Procedure and Advanced Search Function
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3. Results and Discussion
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3.1 Database-website System and Use Demonstration
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To improve the efficiency of information searching, a search website was developed as the user interface by Java-script. When a user enters a word, the request will be sent to Solr and related records will be returned in Json. The result priority can be ranked according to the published date or the relativity calculated by the score function in Solr. To help users analyze the content and narrow down the scope of the search result, we developed a series of statistical functions to automatically generate the time trend, source website contribution, geographic distribution and food keyword frequency. The time trend and source website contribution are based on the general characters extracted during data collection. The number of the administrative unit names in China, including the provinces and cities in each result record, was counted and added up for geographic distribution. The words in our glossary are comprehensive and they relate to food science and safety. The total frequency of each word in the result can reflect the correlation strength between this word and the keyword the user searched for. The keyword entered by users is also recorded for word cloud generation. Figure A is the workflow chart of this database-website system.
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To unearth prominent information in the masses of text, we built a filter for the user who searches food safety information about Hong Kong. The principle is to weigh the information of different regions in accordance with their food volumes imported by Hong Kong. Based on the food import data from the Census and Statistics Department of Hong Kong Government in 2012, the information about regions with larger importing volume is ranked in front.
The Food Safety Information Database for Greater China is both a database and a website-analytical platform with the link http://kwanlab.bio.cuhk.edu.hk:8080/FS/. The website is primarily displayed in Chinese. Users can choose their preferred language through the option box “Select Language” in the webpage header and the whole page will then be translated by Google. Non-Chinese and even non-English users can comprehend the general idea of the 4
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articles with the assistance of Google Translate. Figure B is the Chinese version and Google-translated English version of the homepage. Users can search their topic of interest by entering a keyword into the search box. Because our inhouse food glossary includes the English, Simplified Chinese and Traditional Chinese versions of food terms, the search system will provide the translations of the user’s inquiry in a section called Keyword Translate in the left column, provided that the searched term is in the glossary. To date, more than 1,300,000 pieces of food safety information have been collected from between 1979 and 2015. Table B summarizes the number of source websites, total entries and keywords in our glossary on 7th June, 2015. The search results are displayed in the “Search Results” tab of the data page. The default data priority is based on the published date, but users can rank them according to the relevancy by choosing “Relevance” in the first option box beside “Sort by”. After clicking on the title of an item, the system will direct to the original page of this entry for data extension.
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The statistical information of a search result is listed in the “Statistical Analysis” section on the data page. It has the frequency ranking of sources, keywords, years and locations. The keywords in our glossary are classified in accordance with the number of characters in Chinese, including two-, three-, four-, five- and multi-characters (translated as one word by Google) keywords. Users can utilize these rankings to search sub-topic information by clicking on the keyword they are interested in and then choosing “添加” (Add to) to limit the search results. The corresponding keyword in English is provided to assist non-English users searching English data by clicking on the interested keyword in the list which is to the left of the area of resulting information. The number of result records published in a specific year is shown in the frequency column of “发布日期” (Release date), and a line chart is displayed in years in the middle of statistical analysis section. Meanwhile, the resulting information can be sorted in terms of geography. We have also created a China map to visually illustrate the number of result records with regard to different provinces. The color depth indicates the relative number of result records about different provinces, and the number of specific provinces will be shown when the cursor is placed on it. Moreover, a user can search the keyword in primary search engines, such as Google and Wikipedia, for information extension through the “Further Reading” column in the lower left corner of the data page.
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This database-website system is a semantic tool to help users to find the relevant information quickly. We will demonstrate how to use it through answering the question “which city’s information is contributing most to the media reports about milk”. The user can enter the word “奶” (milk) into the search box, set the type of “News” to search the media reports related to milk. Figure C shows the Chinese version and the Google-translated English version of some statistic information about “奶” search result. Because the database is continuously updated, the results and frequency statistics may vary at different enquiry times. Hong Kong is the most frequently mentioned city in the media reports, and 2013 was the year when most of the reports were released. “Protein” is an important concept in milk which also ranks in front in the keyword statistics. Adding “Protein”, by choosing the “添加” (Add to) option, will decrease the number of result records from 21,439 to 2,953 in two clicks. Excluding the records containing “Protein” from the search results or starting a new search of “Protein” can be easily achieved by choosing “排除” (Exclude) or “搜索” (Search for) after clicking. These functions allow an easy customized search.
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Users can select keywords from the “Word Cloud” on the home page to start a search, and the size of each keyword is based on the number of times which the users have entered it. In the webpage header of the home page, there is a function called “One Week News” to quickly view the news released last week. The linkages to other food safety websites are also provided in “Related Links”. Figure D summarizes the functions on the website and categorizes them into two groups, namely, the semantic analysis of the interested topic and exploration.
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3.2 An Example of Comparing Food Poisoning Data from Different Stakeholders
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This database system collects information from various sources, so that it can serve as complementary data to the authority statistics. The food poisoning data from the government and the media in our database are used as an example for comparison. Food poisoning data from the Chinese government is published mainly by the China CDC. It uses the National Disease Report System to collect the information about food poisoning incidents, and it publishes a statistical report on the official website every season. The information includes the annual number of food poisoning incidents, the percentage of incidents caused by different food hazards and the number of incidents which happened in four implicated locations. We assembled the data in the reports of the China CDC between 2006 and 2012 and then calculated the average values to picture the characteristics of the food poisoning incidents which were reported by the authorities. The media are an essential force in shaping consumers’ perceptions. There are many studies about food adulteration news on the internet whereas researchers are not usually interested in food poisoning cases. We used the keywords “食品中毒” and “食物中毒” (food poisoning) with the article type “News” to search the food poisoning reports from the media and we found 6,701 records in the database, from 2006 to 2012.
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The number of food poisoning incidents reported by the China CDC decreased gradually from 596 in 2006 to 174 in 2012. During the same period, the number of media reports about food poisoning increased from 254 to 1,797 in 2011 and then it reduced to 1,566 in 2012. It shares the same trend with the number of food safety reports in our database, which grew from 2006, peaked in 2011 and then decreased in 2012. Figure E shows the number of food poisoning incidents reported by the China CDC, food poisoning news and food safety news in the Food Safety Database. The number of food poisoning news items changes simultaneously with the number of food safety news items, and the relationship between them should therefore be further analyzed.
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The distributions of implicated locations and causes are different between the food poisoning incidents reported by the China CDC and by the media in our database. The column chart on the left of Figure F shows the percentage of the four implicated locations, and the one on the right shows the percentage of the different causes. Home and school/company cafeterias are the top two locations in the authority data whereas school/company cafeterias and restaurants are the two most frequently mentioned locations in the news. For the implicated causes of food poisoning incidents, there are more news items about man-made chemical hazards and without clearly defined causes.
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The objective of establishing this database-website system is to assist scientists and authorities, especially the ones not familiar with the food safety information system in Greater China, to assess the information about food safety issues, analyze the data, identify the trends and make comparisons in an effective manner. First, this database-website system adopted a web-crawling technique and it extracted a large volume of information in various sectors of food safety. The primary method of collecting related information is to assemble raw data, code filter by hand and store them in a database (Baldi & Mantovani, 2008; Moore, Spink & Lipp, 2012). For instance, Jakszyn et al. (2004) developed a database of nitrosamines, heterocyclic amines and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons based on 139 references from 1980 to 2003. But the total volume of food safety information is huge and it is growing at a tremendous pace. The traditional assembling method, which is labor-intensive, will limit data volume and lead to the slow update of timely information. We therefore used a web-crawler to collect information automatically, and as a result more than 1,300,000 entries, from 1979 to 2015, have been extracted into our Database. In addition, the majority of human-compiled databases concentrate on a specific topic and the scope of their data is narrow. To satisfy the needs of different users, we extracted all the information from source websites for completeness and then constructed a comprehensive food glossary to improve the precision of information searching.
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3.3 The Significance of the Food Safety Information Database for Greater China
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Our database is an important pool of food safety information with high relevancy and credibility. It is the first one-step platform to assess the food safety information from the central and local authorities. With the peer-reviewed academic papers in the CNKI, users can obtain the solid scientific background of the current and emerging food safety risks to aid risk assessment. Our database is also a collection of credible online food safety news. In Mainland China, the massive media reports are disordered and some are malicious. The articles from the mainstream media and professional third-party websites are of a relatively high quality and they can be used for risk communication. We hand-picked these websites to improve their relevancies, which makes the extracted data representative of online food safety information in Greater China.
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In addition to the qualified data, this food safety database also helps users to find relevant information in a mass of text. It offers a wide spectrum of possibilities from simple keywords to complex advanced searches. Compared with the traditional search engines, which give a long list of miscellaneous reports, the statistical functions on our website allow users to reduce the big initial result to a smaller set of relevant articles in one click. More importantly, it is a semantic tool for trends identification and content analysis. Mining the information from a search engine demands time-consuming screening and categorization. The search results in our system are classified, when acquired, in terms of time periods, original sources, geographic regions and food keywords frequency. The system helps users to get an overview of data trends, relevant sources, geographic distribution and hot keywords in seconds. With these functions, we have shown that the number of food poisoning news items changes simultaneously with the number of food safety news items.
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Finally, this database is an open system by which users can explore food safety information. “One Week News” displays the news released last week and “Word Cloud” reflects the keyword popularity among our users. The ranking of keyword frequency connects a user’s enquiry with the concepts in different fields, including food safety, food production, testing, nutrition and biotechnology. These functions aim to provide new insights to users in exploration. The limitation of the Food Safety Information Database for Greater China is the change of source website. During the past three years, about 16% of these websites have shut down or changed their addresses and some new websites have gone online. The team in our laboratory maintains continuous attention until the food safety information system reaches a relatively stable stage on the internet.
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4. Conclusion
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The analysis and prevention of food safety issues require a large amount of information about regulation, supervision, detection methods and previous cases. Our laboratory established the first food safety database-website system to collect online information continuously from the authorities, academics and public media in Greater China. Over 1,300,000 pieces of entry have been extracted by web-crawler from 106 selected sources which have high relevancy and credibility. These data cover a wide spectrum of areas and can be used by non-Chinese audiences with the assistance of Google Translate. In addition to providing tremendous qualified information, this database-website system also aims to improve the efficiency of searching and analysis. A comprehensive food glossary and a keyword-frequency counting technique are adopted to make intelligent content analyses. The website functions classify the results in terms of the geographic regions, time periods, original sources and food-related keywords. It can aid the audience in identifying trends, discovering the hub, revealing the hot spots in different fields and making indepth content analyses.
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This database-website system is useful in reviewing previous food safety issues, understanding the current conditions and developing tools for prevention. Moreover, three data source categories make it an open system for users to not just explore the food safety information within one group, but also to compare the ones from different stakeholders.
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5. Acknowledgements
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The research is supported by the Knowledge Transfer Project Fund KTP111206f37, from The Chinese University of Hong Kong.
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6. References
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Baldi, F., & Mantovani, A. (2008). A new database for food safety: EDID (Endocrine disrupting 8
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chemicals - Diet Interaction Database). Ann Ist Super Sanità, Vol. 44, No. 1: 57–63. Retrieved from http://www.iss.it/publ/anna/2008/1/44157.pdf
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Chau, C.F., & Kwan, H.S. (2005). A Glossary of Food Science and Technology. Retrieved April 3, 2015, from http://cup.columbia.edu/book/a-glossary-of-food-science-and-technology/9789629960926
FAO, Ma, X., & Zhao, J. (2011). Agricultural Biotechnologies: About the glossary. Retrieved April 3, 2015, from http://www.fao.org/biotech/biotech-glossary/about-glossary/en/
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Jakszyn, P., Agudo, A., Ibanez, R., Garcia-Closas, R., Pera, G., Amiano, P. & Gonzalez, C. A. (2004). Development of a Food Database of Nitrosamines, Heterocyclic Amines, and Polycyclic Aromatic Hydrocarbons. J. Nutr., 134(8), 2011–2014. Retrieved from http://jn.nutrition.org/content/134/8/2011.full
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Jia, C., & Jukes, D. (2013). The national food safety control system of China – A systematic review. Food Control, 32(1), 236–245. doi:10.1016/j.foodcont.2012.11.042
Liu, Y., Liu, F., Zhang, J., & Gao, J. (2015). Insights into the nature of food safety issues in Beijing through content analysis of an Internet database of food safety incidents in China. Food Control, 51, 206–211. doi:10.1016/j.foodcont.2014.11.017 Moore, J. C., Spink, J., & Lipp, M. (2012). Development and application of a database of food ingredient fraud and economically motivated adulteration from 1980 to 2010. Journal of Food Science, 77(4), R118–26. doi:10.1111/j.1750-3841.2012.02657.x
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Qiang, L., Wen, L., Jing, W., & Yue, D. (2011). Application of content analysis in food safety reports on the Internet in China. Food Control, 22(2), 252–256. doi:10.1016/j.foodcont.2010.07.005 The Lancet. (2014). China’s food safety: a continuing global problem. Lancet, 384(9941), 377. doi:10.1016/S0140-6736(14)61266-6
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Van de Brug, F. J., Lucas Luijckx, N. B., Cnossen, H. J., & Houben, G. F. (2014). Early signals for emerging food safety risks: From past cases to future identification. Food Control, 39, 75– 86. doi:10.1016/j.foodcont.2013.10.038
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WHO. (2015). WHO | Epidemic intelligence - systematic event detection. Retrieved April 23, 2015, from http://www.who.int/csr/alertresponse/epidemicintelligence/en/
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Appendices
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Table A. The source website list of the Food Safety Information Database for Greater China Serial no.
Website Address
Website
Ministry of Agriculture of the People's Republic of China China Agricultural Information Network
http://www.moa.gov.cn/
3
State Administration for Industry & Commerce of the People's Republic of China
http://www.saic.gov.cn/
4
Ministry of Health of the People's Republic of China National Health and Family Planning Commission of the People's Republic of China
http:// www.moh.gov.cn
6
CFDA
http://www.sfda.gov.cn/WS01/CL0001/
7
SFDA Receiving Center Matters and Complaints
8
12331 Complaint Website for Food and Drug
www.12331.org.cn
9
China National Center for Food Safety Risk Assessment
http://www.chinafoodsafety.net/
10
National Food Safety Information Center
http://www.fsi.gov.cn/
5
of
http://www.agri.gov.cn/
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2
http://www.nhfpc.gov.cn/
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1
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Governmental Agency Group
Administrative
www.sfdaccr.org.cn
China Food Safety Web
12
National Institutes for Food and Drug Control
13
Food Safety Database for China (till 2008)
http://www.fsr.org.cn/
14
China CDC
http://www.chinacdc.cn/
15
Legislative Affair Office of the State Council P.R. China General Administration of Quality Supervision, Inspection and Quarantine of the People's Republic of China
http://www.chinalaw.gov.cn/
17
National Food Quality Safety Law Enforcement & Supervision & Inquiry-service Information System
http://www.nfqs.com.cn/
18
Taiwan FDA
http://www.fda.gov.tw/TC/index.aspx
19
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http://www.cfs.gov.cn/cmsweb/webportal
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http://www.nicpbp.org.cn/CL0001/
http://www.aqsiq.gov.cn/
Center for Food Safety in HKSRA
http://www.cfs.gov.hk/
Center for Health Protection in HKSRA
www.chp.gov.hk
Department of Health in HKSRA
www.dh.gov.hk
Sichuan FDA
http://www.scfda.gov.cn/CL2272/
Shanxi FDA
http://www.shxda.gov.cn
24
Shanxi Food Safety Network
http://www.sxfs.gov.cn/
25
Shanxi FDA
http://www.sxfs.gov.cn/
26
Fujian CDC
http://www.fjcdc.com.cn/
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Fujian FDA
http://www.fjfda.gov.cn
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Fujian Food Safety Information Web
http://www.spqs.cn/
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FDA in Fujian Province
www.fjfda.gov.cn
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Hubei Food and Drug Administration
www.hubfda.gov.cn
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Hubei FDA
http://www.hubfda.gov.cn/
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Disclosure of Food Safety Information in the Government of Hubei Province
http://www.hubei.gov.cn/zwgk/zdlyxxgk/spaqxxgk/
33
Hubei CDC
http://www.hbcdc.cn/
34
Hebei Food Safety Web
http://www.hebfs.gov.cn/
35
Hebei CDC
http://www.hebeicdc.com/index.do?templet=index
36
Guangxi CDC
http://www.gxcdc.com/
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Hainan Center for Disease Control & Prevention
www.hncdc.cn
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Food Safety Network in Hainan Province
http://fs.hifda.gov.cn/CL0044/index.html
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Information of Agriculture, Rural Areas and Farmers in Guangdong Province
www.gdcct.gov.cn
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Guangdong Food and Drug Administration
www.gdda.gov.cn
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Guangdong Food Safety Web
www.gdfs.gov.cn
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Gansu CDC
http://www.gscdc.net/
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Food Safety Network in Anhui Province
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Anhui CDC
45
Jiangsu Food and Drug Administration
46
Heilongjiang Food Information Network
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Heilongjiang CDC
48
Jilin Food and Drug Administration
49
Jilin Food Safety Web
50
Liaoning Food Safety Web
http://www.lnspaq.com/
51
Jiangxi Food Safety Network
http://www.jxfs.gov.cn/
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Zhejiang Food Safety Network
http://www.zjfs.gov.cn/
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Zhejiang CDC
http://www.cdc.zj.cn/bornwcms/Html/zjcdc/
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Henan CDC
55
Academic Group CNKI
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http://www.ahcdc.com.cn/
Service
Food
http://www.jsfda.gov.cn/， www.jsfoodsafety.gov.cn
Safety
http://www.hljfs.gov.cn/
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http://www.jlfs.gov.cn/ywbb/index.jhtml
http://www.hncdc.com.cn/hncdccms/ http://www.cnki.net/
International Food Safety Association
http://www.ncpqh.com/safety/
Bureau of Biological Science and Biotechnology in Chinese Academy of Science
http://www.bio.cas.cn/
Food Safety for China
http://big5.ce.cn/gate/big5/foodsafety.ce.cn/
China Food Technology Web
http://www.tech-food.com/
China National Food Industry Association China Laws and Regulations of Foods, Drugs and Cosmetics
http://www.cnfia.cn/ http://www.chinafdc-law.com/
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Food Business Network
http://www.21food.cn/
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Chinese Food Equipment Net
http://china.foode.com.cn/
64
The World of Risk Management
http://www.riskmw.com/
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http://www.ahsa.gov.cn/
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The Internet of Things in Food Safety
http://www.spaqiot.com/
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Relieved Food
http://www.anxinshipin.com/
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Food Safety Web
http://www.foodsafe.net/foodsafeold/
68
Food Safety in China
http://www.chinafoodsafety.net/newslist/
69
Guangxi Food Safety Network
http://www.gxfsn.gov.cn/CL0215/
70
Haixia Food Safety Web
http://www.cfqn12315.com/
71
Shanxi Food Safety Information Network
http://www.sxspaqxx.com/
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Food Web
http://www.dashipin.com/
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Jiangsu Food Web
http://www.jiangsufood.net
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Henan Food Web
http://www.henanfood.net
75
Shandong Food Web
http://www.shandongfood.net
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Shanghai Food Web
http://www.shanghaifood.net
77
Liaoning Food Web
http://www.liaoningfood.net
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Beijing Food Web
http://www.bjfood.net
79
Hubei Food Web
http://www.hubeifood.net
80
Guangdong Food Web
http://www.guangdongfood.net
81
Fujian Food Web
http://www.fujianfood.net
82
Fujian Food Information Web
83
Hubei Food Web
84
Hebei Food Web
85
Hubei Food Web
86
Food Industry Association in Shandong Province
http://www.sdfood.org.cn/
87
Safe Food
http://www.anxinshipin.com
88
Dare to Eat
89
Guoke
90
Green Peace
91
Aige Agriculture Web
92
Agriculture Sharing Network
http://www.nx28.com/
93
Technology for People's Livelihood Web
http://www.enlife.net.cn/index.htm
94
China Venture Web
http://www.chinaventure.com.cn/
95
Blogger of Yunbo Luo
96
Blogger of Junshi Chen
http://blog.sina.com.cn/iamchenjunshi
97
Blogger of Zhihong Fan
http://snowheart19.blog.sohu.com/
98
Blogger of Tony Ma
http://madong910310.blog.163.com/
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http://www.hebspw.com/index.htm http://www.hbspw.roboo.com/
http://www.ganchi.net
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http://www.guokr.com/ http://www.greenpeace.org/china/zh/campaigns/ http://www.cnagri.com/
http://yunboluo.blog.sohu.com/
China Food Web
http://www.cfqn.com.cn/
News of People -- Act for Food Safety
http://shipin.people.com.cn/GB/86164/220965/index.html
Health News in Sina
http://health.sina.com.cn/index.shtml
Agriculture News in Xinlang
http://nongye.sina.com.cn/
Food Channel in China Central Television
http://www.spnews.cn/
104
Food News Web
http://www.chinafnews.com/
105
Food News in Baidu
http://news.baidu.com/
106
Health News in Sohu
http://health.sohu.com/
100 101 102 103
378
http://www.fjspxxw.com/ http://hubei.cnfood.cn/
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Table B. The number of source websites, total entries and keywords in our glossary of the Food Safety Information Database for Greater China (Data accessed on 7th June, 2015) . Number Source website 89 * Keywords in our glossary 51,621 Entries in the database 1,309,980 Some websites are not available now due to closure or change of address
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Figure A. The workflow chart of the Food Safety Information Database for Greater China, items in brackets are the technique names
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Figure B.1 The Chinese version of the homepage of Food Safety Information Database for Greater China. B.2 The Google-translated English version of the homepage of the Food Safety Information Database for Greater China
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Figure C.1 The Chinese Version of keywords frequency rankings based on the result of searching “奶” in the Food Safety Information Database for Greater China. C.2 The Google-translated English version of keywords frequency rankings based on the result of searching “奶” in the Food Safety Information Database for Greater China
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Figure D. Functions for semantic analysis and exploration on the user interface of the Food Safety Information Database for Greater China
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Figure E. The number of food safety news items and the food poisoning news items in the Food Safety Information Database for Greater China and the food poisoning incidents reported by the China CDC
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Figure F.1 The percentage of the four implicated locations in the reports from the China CDC and news items from the Food Safety Information Database for Greater China. F.2 The percentage of different causes in the reports from the China CDC and news items from the Food Safety Information Database for Greater China
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Highlight: 1. Over 1,300,000 pieces of information were extracted by web-crawler in Greater China. 2. The in-house glossary has 51621 keywords of food, nutrition and biotechnology.
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3. Search results are grouped according to place, time, source and keyword automatically.
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4. The system can be used to compare food safety information from different stakeholders.