the agriculture ontology service initiative

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The Agriculture Ontology Service

Initiative

APAN Conference20 July 2006

Singapore

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Outline

• AGROVOC today• AOS and AOS/CS• AOS/CS Workbench• The AIMS web site• Next steps• Open issues• Conclusion

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AGROVOC today

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AGROVOC today (1/2)

• Worldwide used• Multilingual• Term-based• Limited semantics• Maintained as a relational database• Distributed in several format (RDBMS,

TagText, ISO2709, ...)

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AGROVOC today (2/2)

• Draft versions available in SKOS, OWL• Available through Web Services

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AOS and the CS

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AOS: what do we want

vesselvesse

l

ship or

container

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AOS: better serving web applications• Intelligent query expansion• Semantic Navigation of Knowledge• Semantic navigation of bibliographical metadata• Terminology brokering • Improved natural language processing

– Language recognition– Improved parsing (combinatorial)– Extended concept resolution

• Inferencing/ Reasoning• Machine learning• Clustering• Ranking

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AOS/CS (1/2)

RDBMSAGROVOC

RDFS formats(e.g. SKOS)

Better definedstructure

Better definedstructure

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AOS/CS (2/2)

• Concept based• More semantics• “Language independent”• Easy integration with other KOS• Easy sharable within the Web

Better definedstructure

Ontology + OWL

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AOS Overall picture

OntoTermWorkbench

AGROVOCOWL

export

AGROVOCRDFS formats

(e.g. SKOS)and

TagTextISO2709

Other thesauriand

terminologies

integration

ABACA NT1 Food NT2 AppleANIMAL BT Organ NT ....

mapping

Other thesauriand

terminologiesABACA NT1 Food NT2 AppleANIMAL BT Organ NT ....

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AOS/CS Workbench

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AOS/CS Workbench (1/3)• Support and manage the multi-language terminology

work of information management specialists in the development, maintenance, and quality assurance of the AOS/CS

• Features– Text processing– Corpus Creation– Corpus Analysis– Term/Relationship

Management– Quality Assurance– Versioning and

Deployment

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AOS/CS Workbench (2/3)

.doc, .pdf, .xml, etc.

Concept Hierarchy

inpu

t

AOS/CSWorkbenchconcordance pattern-matchingmultilingual

text corpus

input

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AOS/CS Workbench (3/3)• Users

– Term editor– Ontology editor– Validator– Publisher– Administrator

• Functionalities– Terms management - Search– Concepts management - Import / Export– Classification schemes - Corpus– Validations - Administration– Help

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Agricultural Information Management Systems Web site

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Agricultural Information Management Standards Web site

• to establish a network of partners and provide one-stop and free access to information and tools;

• to bring together information about currently available standards (KOS, metadata sets);

• to encourage the re-use of these standards to facilitate interoperability;

• to increase awareness of these freely available resources;

• to promote sharing of good practice examples;• to provide channels for communication between

different actors in the community.

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AIMS for Networking

• Lists partners who agree to share and commit themselves to contribute staff time to support the activities

• Provides list of currently running projects between the partners

• Provides discussion forums for people of common interests to come together and discuss metadata and vocabularies, tools and share knowledge.

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Vocabularies

• Browse, search and download the AGROVOC Thesaurus

• Access the AGROVOC Webservices• Browse Knowledge Organization Systems by

domain (e.g. Fisheries and Aquaculture, Forestry) or type (e.g. Classification schemes, Ontologies)

• Updates on the AOS Concept Server project and its current status

• Glossary and Frequently asked Questions about vocabularies

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Metadata Standards

• The Agricultural Metadata Element Set (AgMES) and its work

• Metadata schemas used for description of different resource types: Documents, Events, Organizations, Projects, Plants, Statistical Metadata etc.

• Standard application profiles currently in use by Partners of the initiative

• Glossary and Frequently asked questions about vocabularies

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Tools

• Lists of tried and tested freely available tools for : – Creating, editing and managing metadata/Catalogues– Mapping, merging, validating, editing and managing

Ontologies– Maintaining and refining Thesauri– Validating, parsing, aggregating services XML/RDF data

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Publications (and other useful resources)

• Lists of published journal articles, conference papers and presentations, concept/position papers and usage guides

• Lists and presentations from the Coherence and AOS workshops.

• Training Resources: IMARK Kits• Free online journals discussing information

management

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Next stepsOpen issueConclusion

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Next Steps

• AOS/CS workbench – Design– Development– Tests– Import current data

• Create a network of ontology experts– Workshops and training

• Promotion– AOS workshops– Summer school (KU)

• NeOn interaction

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Open issues

• Ontology lifecycle• Ontology mapping• Ontology merging• No more words but URIs in IS• Better exploitation of the potentiality at the

application level: powerful IR• Ontology Web services (OWS)

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Conclusion

• AOS still a success story and gain terrain in private sector

• More ontologies in FAO• NeOn toolkit

From here....

To here....

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margherita.sini@fao.org

asanee_naist@yahoo.com

Thank you!