Knowledge book on milk microfiltration : an INRA project to identify key actions in research on proteins fractionation

The expertise of both industry and research institutes has created an important collection of knowledgeon food processes, which is the result of scientific and technological research and experimental know-how. However, despite a great number of results published in the form of “peer” reviewed papers andpatents, it has been failed to formalize, organize and complete the acquired knowledge. The need for asustained capitalization is crucial in view of: i) preventing the loss of knowledge due to the departure ofemployees over the years; ii) avoiding the dispersal of existing experimental data; iii) and finally,allowing optimal exploitation of data and knowledge. The objective of this work is to address these challenges by developing an electronic knowledge book(kBook) of one specific food process, the microfiltration of skimmed milk. Microfiltration of skimmed milkis widely used in the dairy industry to separate casein micelles from soluble protein aiming at producinga retentate used in cheese making and a permeate containing whey proteins with valuable nutritionaland functional properties. Due to the increasingly use of this operation at industrial scale, there is a need to collect and correlate the existing knowledge in a structured way and to gain a better insight ofthe overall process. The knowledge was first elicited through semi-structured interviews with a group of experts on dairy filtration. Concomitantly, data and knowledge from patents and literature was collated. In a next step, akBook was established, whose pages were formatted in concept maps (cmap) and technical sheets thatare connected by hypertext links. A cmap is a semantic graph where nodes represent concepts that areconnected by arcs expressing the relationships between them. A formatted cmap answers a specificquestion about one central concept. The hyperlinks between cmaps, technical sheets and cmaps andtechnical sheets form a network of knowledge which can be browsed by the user to find relevantanswers to its questions.Several knowledge areas have been identified so far including milk pretreatment, microbiological stabilization, microfiltration and analytical methods for the characterization of fractions. A global representation of the overall process from raw milk to fractions of proteins, based on the individual cmaps has been built. The practical structuration of the knowledge and the original version of the kBook will be disclosed at the congress. The development and use of this new approach for the representationof a food processe will be discussed.