glossary

Ontology

The term "ontology" has been used for a number of years by the artificial intelligence and knowledge representation community but is now becoming part of the standard terminology of a much wider community including information systems modelling and XML. It describes domain knowledge in a generic way and provides an agreed-upon understanding of a domain. A more concise definition might be: An ontology is a system that contains terms, the definitions of those terms, and the specification of relationships among those terms.

AGRIS Application Profile

Application profiles are defined as schemas which consist of data elements drawn from one or more namespaces, combined together by implementers, and optimized for a particular local application.

AGROVOC

Multilingual agricultural thesaurus produced by FAO, and used for indexing and cataloguing in many organizations and institutes around the world.

Domain knowledge

A domain is an area of control or a sphere of knowledge, e.g. acquaculture, fisheries. Domain knowledge is the extent and depth of practical experience and recorded understanding that an individual, institute or organization has of a given sphere of activity.
top

Open standards

The goal behind open (product-independent) standards initiatives for information formats such as Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML), Extensible Markup Language (XML), and Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), is not that of creating structured, i.e. restrictive, information standards. The Open Standards movement looks for ways of providing forums to discuss and promote interoperability standards; and to recommend ways of extending and improving interoperability among users.
top

Semantic Web

The Semantic Web is the name given to the "vision" of the creator of the World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee, whereby every site on the Web will understand the data on every other site, not due to rigidly enforced standard protocols or grab-all formats; but thanks to total data knowledge produced by data mappings. XML (Extensible Mark-up Language) and RDF (Resource Description Framework) are tools to bring this about.

Taxonomy

A taxonomy is an information organisation tool, constructed to enable the user to gain an understanding of, and navigate around, available information by means of a formal structure (arrangements) and labels (names) to aid in locating it. A good taxonomy will take into account the importance of separating elements of a group into subgroups that are mutually exclusive, unambiguous, and taken together, include all possibilities.

Topic Maps

Topic maps allow readers to navigate by following topics that may appear in multiple documents. A topic is a link that contains a title and points to places in documents where there are occurrences of this topic. These places, otherwise called anchors, can be grouped according to the roles they play, and the anchor roles orient the navigation (eg. definition, mention, example, etc.). A topic map is functionally equivalent to multi-document indexes, glossaries and thesauri. Topics are organized in types, each instance of a topic type has a title, and each occurrence of a given topic type is described including the semantics of the anchor role.

XML

eXtensible Markup Language. XML is the universal format for structured documents and data on the Web. It is designed to improve the functinality of the Web by providing more flexible and adaptable information identification. It is called extensible because it is not a fixed format like HTML (a single, predefined markup language). XML is actually a 'metalanguage' - a language for describing other languages - which lets you design your own customized markup languages for limitless different types of documents. XML can do this because it is written in SGML, the international standard metalanguage for text markup systems (ISO 8879).

XML Schema

A "schema" is a blueprint for a specific class of XML document. It lays down rules for the types of elements and attributes allowed within an XML document, the types of values that accompany such elements, and the order and occurrence of these elements.
top