Guidelines for mapping the preferences in gender sensitive product profiles to crop ontology and creating a consumer segment ontology. Version 1.0.

Abstract

The guidelines were developed to guide scientists, database managers and ontology curators to annotate their product profiles with the ontology the proper social dimensions, documenting trait preferences in a way that it can be interpretable by breeders and food scientists. The development of breeding product profiles targeting specific market segments or consumer segments supposes that breeders can access interpretable information about the key preferences of the end users. The translation or interpretation of the collected preferences into traits and variables to make it interpretable and measurable by breeders is not always straightforward. A lot of contextual information needs to be included.

The Guidelines were produced for the Research Programme on Roots, tubers and Bananas (RTB) and the RTBFoods project with the support of the CGIAR Gender Platform. Provided examples are taken from the RTB Foods-Alliance Bioversity CIAT report entitled ‘Gendered-food mapping on Matooke in Uganda: Understanding the Drivers of Trait Preferences and the ‘Development of Multi-user RTB Product Profiles’ (Marimo P. et al, 2021) and the RTBFoods ‘Gendered Food Product Profile Template’ (Forsythe et al, 2022),

This version will go through further revisions following additional feedback provided by experts.