The acceptance of functional foods in Denmark, Finland and the United States: A study of consumers' conjoint evaluations of the qualities of functional foods and perceptions of general health factors and cultural values.

Functional foods is a relatively new concept covering food products enriched with various kinds of (natural) substances (eg vitamins, minerals or probiotic cultures) or modified so as to provide consumers with an additional physiological benefit presumed to prevent disease or promote health, without them having to change their eating habits fundamentally. 2. Health is one of the most important choice criteria, when consumers purchase food products. The fact that most health consequences of food are long term and therefore inaccessible at the time of purchase, the evaluation has to be based on nutritional information, eg health claims and other more accessible food qualities, eg taste, appearance, and processing method (when disclosed) which consumers may associate with health in one way or another. Consumers’ acceptance of functional foods therefore depends on the health information available as well as on their associations between wholesomeness and other qualities of functional foods. 3. Experience with functional foods introduced so far has disclosed national differences when it comes to consumer acceptance. One explanation may be that legislation on health claims varies across countries; another explanation may be differences in cultural values, which possibly lead to different associations between wholesomeness and other quality aspects, such as taste, convenience and method of processing. 4. Using conjoint analysis and survey questions (n=1500), the aim of the study presented in this paper is to investigate whether there are differences in the acceptance of functional foods in Denmark, Finland and the United States, and to which extent they are related to differences in consumers’ nutritional knowledge, health associations and cultural values. The general results of the study indicate that Finnish consumers accept functional foods more readily than do American and Danish consumers. In all three countries, however, the results also indicate that consumers are more positive towards enrichments with well-known nutritional effects and that the use of health claims, which are restricted by law in all three countries, has a potential, positive effect on the acceptance of functional foods.Consumer behaviour; evaluations; functional food; health factors; cultural values

Dimensional enrichment of statistical linked open data

On-Line Analytical Processing (OLAP) is a data analysis technique typically used for local and well-prepared data. However, initiatives like Open Data and Open Government bring new and publicly available data on the web that are to be analyzed in the same way. The use of semantic web technologies for this context is especially encouraged by the Linked Data initiative. There is already a considerable amount of statistical linked open data sets published using the RDF Data Cube Vocabulary (QB) which is designed for these purposes. However, QB lacks some essential schema constructs (e.g., dimension levels) to support OLAP. Thus, the QB4OLAP vocabulary has been proposed to extend QB with the necessary constructs and be fully compliant with OLAP. In this paper, we focus on the enrichment of an existing QB data set with QB4OLAP semantics. We first thoroughly compare the two vocabularies and outline the benefits of QB4OLAP. Then, we propose a series of steps to automate the enrichment of QB data sets with specific QB4OLAP semantics; being the most important, the definition of aggregate functions and the detection of new concepts in the dimension hierarchy construction. The proposed steps are defined to form a semi-automatic enrichment method, which is implemented in a tool that enables the enrichment in an interactive and iterative fashion. The user can enrich the QB data set with QB4OLAP concepts (e.g., full-fledged dimension hierarchies) by choosing among the candidate concepts automatically discovered with the steps proposed. Finally, we conduct experiments with 25 users and use three real-world QB data sets to evaluate our approach. The evaluation demonstrates the feasibility of our approach and shows that, in practice, our tool facilitates, speeds up, and guarantees the correct results of the enrichment process.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft