news archive

The Fishery Ontology Service exploratory project

The AOS consortium agreed to develop prototypes for three distinct disciplines during 2002: Fisheries, Crop-pests and Anti-microbes (see announcement below, March 2002). The Core Ontology v.1 - Fisheries, has just been released and includes more than 2500 ontology elements. It was developed by the CNR (Centro Nazionale di Ricerche) Institute of Cognitive Sciences and Technology, Italy, in collaboration with FAO. The domain ontology is being integrated in the core and to date, more than 2500 concepts have been plugged in from ASFA and FIGIS. [Powerpoint presentation available here - "Fishery Ontology Service exploratory project"]

The Fishery Ontology Status report 3 (November 2002) produced by the CNR team provides a résumé of the work done and a steps being undertaken for Core version 2. Fishery Ontology Status report 2 (September 2002) is an early progress report for the FOS project. See Fishery Ontology - for a first graphical representation of the methodology used for the core ontology creation.

December 2002

AGROVOC - FAO's multilingual agricultural thesaurus now available in Arabic and Chinese

FAO's agricultural thesaurus, AGROVOC, is now online in Arabic and Chinese in addition to the existing English, French and Spanish versions.

AGROVOC is used throughout FAO's web pages to help locate subject-specific information and is particularly relevant to indexers, librarians and translators working in the global food and agriculture sector. It has been adopted as a standard by documentation centres around the world and versions in Czech, German, Italian, Polish and Portuguese have been created by research institutions and universities in several countries. AGROVOC has, however, become much more than the organization's thesaurus: it is referred to as an international standard by many organizations world-wide. Case studies have been made extensively about its method, structure, and applicability.

AGROVOC is the foundation that underpins the development of the Agricultural ontology service project (AOS). By making use of knowledge contained in vocabulary systems and thesauri such as AGROVOC, AOS is committed to developing specialized domain-specific terminologies and concepts that will better support information management for the web environment. AGROVOC (Multilingual Agricultural Thesaurus) is on-line at AGROVOC

March 2002

Prototypes development to be launched for the AOS project

Following the consensus to proceed with the development of AOS project, The AOS consortium has decided to develop prototypes that serve as proof of concept for the AOS project. During the year 2002 three prototypes will be developed. These are the Fishery Ontology, Crop-Pest Ontology and Anti-Microbial Ontology. The goal of the prototype is to illustrate the potentials of ontology supported information systems and to show the benefits of the AOS approach to potential users.

The main issue that these ontologies will try to solve is to improve search results using ontologies. Other technical objectives that are to be sought during the development of the prototypes include the technological and methodological aspects of ontology development. These include: a) testing a methodology for constructing the ontology, b) testing knowledge representation languages for modeling the ontology, c) designing user interface for ontology-assisted search, and d) developing techniques for evaluating ontology-supported interface with an existing community of users.

Fishery Ontology   Crop-Pest Ontology    Anti-Microbial Ontology

Notice to all interested!

The AOS Launch Group warmly invites all interested individuals and organisations who wish to discuss the AOS project and contribute their knowledge in building up the AOS to join the AGStandards mailing list. The AGStandards mailing list is a moderated discussion forum.

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