`Software for Improved Olive Oil Evaluation Developed in Spain - Olive Oil Times
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Software for Improved Olive Oil Evaluation Developed in Spain

By Naomi Tupper
Mar. 5, 2013 11:51 UTC


Citoliva

A research group at the University of Jaén, Spain, has devel­oped a new soft­ware pro­gram designed to eval­u­ate and clas­sify extra vir­gin olive oils.

The inno­v­a­tive soft­ware is hoped to be a break­through in the sen­sory eval­u­a­tion process of olive oil and is a joint col­lab­o­ra­tion between the uni­ver­sity, olive oil tech­nol­ogy com­pany Citoliva, CM Europe SL Laboratories and com­puter engi­neer­ing com­pany MENGISOFT.

According to research group mem­ber Macarena Espinilla, the new soft­ware will vastly improve the sen­sory eval­u­a­tion of vir­gin olive oils by reduc­ing both the time and cost asso­ci­ated with the pro­ce­dure.

The soft­ware will func­tion by stream­lin­ing the process of olive oil eval­u­a­tion, allow­ing the indi­vid­ual mon­i­tor­ing of the evo­lu­tion of dif­fer­ent tasters for dif­fer­ent sam­ples and ses­sions in real time. Interventions to cor­rect devi­a­tions of organolep­tic prop­er­ties can then be car­ried out by the chief of the panel.

The soft­ware also has the poten­tial to plan olive oil tast­ing ses­sions, man­age oil eval­u­a­tions and gen­er­ate final reports, thus offer­ing fur­ther opti­miza­tion of the process.

The pro­gram allows the use of the eval­u­a­tion method­ol­ogy estab­lished by the International Olive Council for sen­sory clas­si­fi­ca­tion of olive oil, but can also be used with new meth­ods of eval­u­a­tion that have been devel­oped by the group, that are cur­rently under­go­ing eval­u­a­tion.

The method is based on the ​“fuzzy logic sys­tem,” a math­e­mat­i­cal logic that is designed to make a deci­sion as a human being would, con­sid­er­ing all avail­able infor­ma­tion and mak­ing the best deci­sion based on this input. This inno­v­a­tive model for sen­sory eval­u­a­tion is being pre­sented as an alter­na­tive to the cur­rent International Olive Council model, and is hoped to facil­i­tate improve­ment in the areas of infor­ma­tion pro­cess­ing, tast­ing and train­ing of asses­sors, whilst still main­tain­ing the effi­ciency of results.

Further down the track, the new model for sen­sory eval­u­a­tion is hoped to be imple­mented with the new soft­ware, with the aim to add value to the olive oil indus­try by improv­ing mar­ket­ing processes and increas­ing com­pet­i­tive­ness of com­pa­nies in the indus­try.

The new pro­gram, in addi­tion to the sen­sory eval­u­a­tion model, are part of a project funded by the Ministry of Economy, Innovation and Science of the Council of Andalucía.


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